Hard luck & heavy rain : the ecology of stories in southeast Texas /
In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness and oil refinery smoke. His informants' stories cover a wide...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Durham, North Carolina :
Duke University Press,
2023.
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| Summary: | In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness and oil refinery smoke. His informants' stories cover a wide swath of life, from histories of LGBT life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the refinery belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backwards victims of circumstances. Russo shows that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States |
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| Physical Description: | x, 137 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781478019053 1478019050 9781478016410 1478016418 |