The Country and the City

“Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crisis of our society”, concluded Raymond Williams in a classic study of the cultural historical variety and density of this opposition. By conceiving the country and city as central symbols for conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development and as historically produced –and therefore historically changing– notions, we will travel across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to examine how phenomena associated with urban and rural imaginaries in Contemporary Spain were understood in their time and how they are understood today. Migration and urban concentration, the ecological emergency, the rural depopulation, the environmental dispossession, nation-building processes, and class and gender conflicts will be the center of our discussion. To address these issues, we will read essays, short stories, graphic novels, as well as theoretical texts that offer varied approaches to history, aesthetics, and politics. The works by writers Rosalía de Castro, Federico García Lorca, or Luisa Carnés; film-makers like Carla Simón, Pedro Almodóvar, or Alberto Rodríguez, or philosophers and scholars such as Mike Davies or Yayo Herrero will be some of the materials from which to study the cultural logics of the country and the city.