“Defamiliarization” is the most common English translation of the Russian astrane‐niye , the term given by Viktor Shklovsky to describe the essentially estranging purpose and effect of art. The term (sometimes translated as “estrangement”) was first introduced in 1917, in the article “Iskusstvo, kak priyom” (“Art as technique,” or “Art as device”), in the journal Sborniki po teorii poeticheskovo yazyka (Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language). Defamiliarization, which quickly became a key concept for formalist literary criticism, works by making everyday objects unfamiliar and thus recovering for the audience “the sensations of life” (Shklovsky 1965[1917]: 12). Shklovsky, widely viewed as the founder of Russian formalism, identifies defamiliarization as the artistic technique able, in his famous example, “to make the stone stony” (12).

This chapter investigates the Gothic as a mode of writing that escaped generic literary boundaries during the British debates over the French Revolution in order to express more widespread fears of cultural decline. Positing the current ubiquity of the zombie as a resurgence of this Gothic mode, the chapter explores zombie-apocalypse texts as expressing a return of Malthusian worries about population growth, climate change, financial instability, and energy insecurity. The zombie-apocalypse genre, popularized by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), released within a few years of U.S. peak oil production, has become a mainstay of global cinema, fiction, and television in the recent international scramble for alternative energy sources. These texts, like the Gothic in its first heyday, demonstrate a conflicted desire both to confront and dismiss problems that seem as inconceivable as they appear to be insoluble. Today’s zombie stands, then, much as the envisioned undead did for earlier British writers like Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, as the spectre of regression so unimaginable within the reigning cultural narrative of the time that its nightmarish possibility may be repressed by the very same spectacle of apocalyptic carnage used to figure it.

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Although Raymond De Young points out the current response to energy descent he terms localization "is not globalization in reverse", the writers of modernity's energy ramp-up used many of the same techniques De Young proposes for adapting to the downslope of M. King Hubbert's fossil-fuels peak. Among these is pre-familiarization, the construction of mental models that "help people to feel at home in a place they have not yet inhabited." Long before William Catton's depiction of the West's outsized energy user as Homo colossus, for example, Joel Barlow provided early national Americans with a reflection of themselves as gigantic consumers of the continent's bounty in his 1787 Vision of Columbus. In the epic poem, Barlow puts in place foundational elements of the myth of progress that will develop with an increasingly extravagant energy consumption: a refutation of the classical republican model of history as cyclical; a conflation of the process of resource extraction with that of production; a characterization of this "production" as the natural trait of the knowledgeable, moral Western subject; the pairing of this characterization with a racialized discourse; and an assertion of climate melioration that anticipates by two centuries the counter-arguments of anthropogenic climate-change denialists. The poem invites its reader to inhabit the skin of a lofty and distanced observer of natural life, drawing on the earlier century's infatuation with the prospect view, to help the reader become "pre-familiarized" with an idea of him-or herself fitting an economic model of endless growth. In the work, therefore, might be found not only the blueprints for an as-yet inchoate Anthropocene, but also the design of a new humanity to go along with it.Keywords: Joel Barlow; Vision of Columbus; early American republic; energy consumption; pre-familiarization; race; climate change; economic growth; localization; historiography Flows of energy do work and also cause all kinds of activities not ordinarily thought of as work, such as the enjoyment of beauty and the feeling of love. Energy use in the fossil-fuels age is frequently figured as a mountain, one whose size has not precluded its being largely ignored by many areas of scholarship, including literary studies ([2], p. xxiii). According to this metaphor, the modernizing nations of Western Europe and the United States entered in the early nineteenth century upon an "upslope" of ever-greater energy use, depending increasingly upon the dense resources of coal, gas, and oil. In recent times, global extraction has gained a "peak", one often associated with the name of M. King Hubbert. Hubbert, a petroleum engineer who accurately predicted the maximum point of American conventional-oil extraction more than a decade before it happened, created a mathematical model that presents modernity's energy mountain in graphic terms:

This article examines Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) as an example of film noir's exploration of the affective dimension of early oil-regime America. Drawing on the work of energy-humanities scholars, the article finds the film, and by extension the genre, providing a much-needed ground-level perspective on the efforts of industry and government to stimulate oil consumption by creating desires in a public struggling with the inherent paradoxes of new technologies, foremost among them the car. The automobile gave rise to “automobility,” seemingly an expansion of democratic freedoms, yet that new way of life also entrapped its participants within destructive habits of consumption involving an entire suite of beliefs, practices, habits, and other technologies. These features of the new life, in turn, were understood within a racialized narrative of whiteness to be productive rather than extractive habits. The shadowy and fated network to which film noir gestures, the article thus argues, is not some abstract metaphysical contemplation or generalized conclusion on a period of war, but a felt recognition of the ways the rapidly expanding network of extraction, distribution, and consumption was compelling Americans to remake their lives in dramatic ways that felt beyond their control.