The rural stands as a fraught American symbol, positioned in stark contrast to its corollary: the urban and its cosmopolitan subjects. The American rural is variously represented as vulnerable, disappearing, backwards, regressive, slow. In this course, we elucidate the texture of the American Rural by engaging with ethnographic writing from the early 20th century into the contemporary. In exploring the rural as a meeting place of working-class expressive cultures, an atmosphere of slow or strange time, a dramatic history of industry and agriculture, a notoriously tense racial zone, an icon of severity, and a place of exuberant stories and poetics, we uncover the vital ideological function of the rural as the urban's dark twin in American myth throughout history and today. |