As a society that went through an accelerated industrialization and a massive migration from country to city, Spain has a complicated relation with its rural world. Some Spanish writers and filmmakers have often created representations of the rural as a backward, inhospitable, and even monstrous milieu. Other artists have produced nostalgic narratives of a quiet, simple, and authentic rural life. This course will examine these and other qualities typically associated with the rural, focusing on recurrent themes and figures such as the community of ancestral traditions, the oppressed peasant, the abandoned village, the idyllic garden, the displaced rural migrant, and the legendary rural past. We will pay special attention to the formal strategies that artists use when dealing with these stereotypes, and also to the political and ethical implications they have had at different moments in contemporary Spanish history, from the civil war and the Franco dictatorship to capitalist modernization and democracy. We will study films by Luis Buñuel, Pedro Almodóvar, José Antonio Nieves-Conde, Luis García-Berlanga, Carlos Saura, Pilar Miró, Mario Camús, and Montxo Armendáriz, as well as literary works by Camilo José Cela, Juan Marsé, Miguel Delibes, Ramiro Pinilla, Luis Mateo Díez, Bernardo Atxaga, and Julio Llamazares.