Poezie, crimă și capital internațional. Geo Bogza și petromodernitatea interbelică

Abstract

Petromodernity refers to a stage of development in Western societies which signals an unprecedented level of social and ecological integration. Its features are the global reach of civilizational modernity and the capacity to generate forms of world art and literature. This article focuses on several aspects of the culture of petromodernity in the Romanian interwar period. Indicating the pervasiveness of the „living oil” in novels of the automobile, we focus on two novelists of the oil extraction environment, Cezar Petrescu and Mihail Sebastian, and also on a poet and reporter, Geo Bogza, with a particular ethical sensitivity toward the social disequilibrium and ecological hazards in the world of oil. His Petroleum Poem (1934) makes a particularly incisive case against the cynicism of modern, oil-based modernity, by sporting a paradoxically Satanic mask and using the political force of the sublime.