Date of Award

8-23-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition

Advisor(s)

Eileen Schell

Keywords

Nation;Nostalgia;Popular Culture;Rhetoric;Rural;Story

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Rhetoric and Composition

Abstract

Drawing from queer and feminist methodologies, Pulling Up the Tangled Roots of Rural Nostalgia engages rhetorical analysis of popular culture texts, specifically the film The Power of the Dog (2021) and television shows Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020) and Reservation Dogs (2021- ), and material spaces, specifically Yellowstone National Park, to develop a framework for tracing how particular constructions of rural nostalgia (such as “the small town,” “the frontier,” “the cowboy,” “the Indian Other,” “the wilderness”) circulate back and forth across widely consumed digital texts, collective imaginaries, political structures, and material spaces. As my dissertation pulls up and examines the tangled roots of rural nostalgia—roots that take us to the very origin stories on which the nation was built—I ask who is invested in nostalgic narratives of rurality, why, and to what ends. In conjunction, I map the ways rural nostalgia and its rhetorical constructions (such as “the cowboy,” “the noble savage,” and “the hick”) contribute to the composition of our social and political realities—from land use and management to the intersectional structures of gender, race, and class. Further, I ask what pedagogical possibilities we might find modeled in contemporary popular culture texts and in the composition of rural spaces. What might we—as researchers, writing instructors, and community members—learn about deploying rhetorical and narrative tactics in ways that revise our deepest, and most divisive, stories? Ultimately, this work contributes to conversations across rural, narrative, queer, feminist, settler colonial, and rhetoric and composition studies; proposes new ways of understanding and responding to the past times, places, and ways of life that rhetorics of rural nostalgia attempt to bring into the future; and perhaps most urgently, points to possibilities for suturing harmful divides across rural, urban, and suburban communities.

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Open Access

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