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Author: Noah Cohan Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496216199 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Sports fandom—often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation—determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays. While it may seem that sports narratives are “written” by athletes and journalists, Cohan demonstrates that fans are not passive consumers but rather function as readers and writers who appropriate those narratives and generate their own stories in building their sense of identity. Critically reading stories of sports fans’ self-definition across genres, from the novel and the memoir to the film and the blog post, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers recovers sports games as sites where fan-authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative itself. Fan stories demonstrate how unscripted sporting entertainments function as identity-building narratives—which, in turn, enhances our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life stories. Building on the work of sports historians, theorists of fan behavior, and critics of American literature, Cohan shows that humanistic methods are urgently needed for developing nuanced critical conversations about athletics. Sports take shape as stories, and it is scholars in the humanities who can best identify how they do so—and why that matters for American culture more broadly.
Author: Noah Cohan Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496216199 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Sports fandom—often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation—determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays. While it may seem that sports narratives are “written” by athletes and journalists, Cohan demonstrates that fans are not passive consumers but rather function as readers and writers who appropriate those narratives and generate their own stories in building their sense of identity. Critically reading stories of sports fans’ self-definition across genres, from the novel and the memoir to the film and the blog post, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers recovers sports games as sites where fan-authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative itself. Fan stories demonstrate how unscripted sporting entertainments function as identity-building narratives—which, in turn, enhances our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life stories. Building on the work of sports historians, theorists of fan behavior, and critics of American literature, Cohan shows that humanistic methods are urgently needed for developing nuanced critical conversations about athletics. Sports take shape as stories, and it is scholars in the humanities who can best identify how they do so—and why that matters for American culture more broadly.
Author: Noah Liljengren Cohan Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
"We Average Unbeautiful Watchers" traces the role of the American sports fan across literary genres from the novel to the memoir to the blog post. Representing mass-mediated athletics as fundamentally narrative-based entertainments, I argue that fans function as readers whether they realize it or not. Further, while it may seem that sports narratives are "written" by athletes and assigned meaning by journalists, my project demonstrates that fans appropriate those narratives in diverse ways to form their own sense of identity. Inscribed in Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968), David Shields's Black Planet (1999), and the blog writings of FreeDarko.com (2005-2011), among other texts, these fan narratives show the literary relevance of an influential realm of popular culture too long ignored by critics. In what we might call the literature of American fandom, sports become sites where authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative. Just as importantly, these narratives demonstrate the readerly resonances between the interpretations of live entertainments and of imaginative narratives--connections that enhance our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life narratives.
Author: Aaron Baker Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813596904 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 140
Book Description
Baseball has long been viewed as the Great American Pastime, so it is no surprise that the sport has inspired many Hollywood films and television series. But how do these works depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society? This study offers an extensive look at nearly one hundred years of baseball-themed movies, documentaries, and TV shows. Film and sports scholar Aaron Baker examines works like A League of their Own (1992) and Sugar (2008), which dramatize the underrepresented contributions of female and immigrant players, alongside classic baseball movies like The Natural that are full of nostalgia for a time when native-born white men could use the game to achieve the American dream. He further explores how biopics have both mythologized and demystified such legendary figures as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela. The Baseball Film charts the variety of ways that Hollywood presents the game as integral to American life, whether showing little league as a site of parent-child bonding or depicting fans’ lifelong love affairs with their home teams. Covering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976), this book offers an essential look at one of the most cinematic of all sports.
Author: Carrie Tipton Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press ISBN: 0826506410 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify. The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture. This book unearths the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.
Author: David Foster Wallace Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0759514925 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters. "Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking, and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Author: David Foster Wallace Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0316284823 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 106
Book Description
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: a collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. A "long-time rabid fan of tennis," and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace's five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time. This lively and entertaining collection begins with Wallace's own experience as a prodigious tennis player ("Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"). He also challenges the sports memoir genre ("How Tracy Austen Broke My Heart"), takes us to the US Open ("Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open"), and profiles of two of the world's greatest tennis players ("Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" and "Federer Both Flesh and Not"). With infectious enthusiasm and enormous heart, Wallace's writing shows us the beauty, complexity, and brilliance of the game he loved best.
Author: Tadhg Coakley Publisher: Merrion Press ISBN: 178537298X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
This book is a multifaceted reflection on sport. It is part memoir, outlining Tadhg Coakley’s time as a player and fan of sport and how it has shaped his life. It is also a book of essays critiquing several aspects of sport, both good and bad, and showing its influence in the wider world. It is also a work of auto-fiction, wherein Coakley uses his novelistic abilities to chart narratives, personal and public. It is, finally, a work of scholarship, brilliantly interweaving the author’s view of a life spent inside and outside the white lines with the cultural discourse of previous writers and thinkers on the many themes explored. The book is an exploration and explanation of what sport means, why it is the world's largest single consumer product and such a dominant/pervasive presence in Irish culture. Why, for example, were the terms ‘European Championships’ and ‘Premier League’ the top Google searches in Ireland for 2021? Why was Christian Eriksen the most searched person? In this book Tadhg Coakley interacts with sport in the way that Olivia Laing interacts with isolation (The Lonely City) Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine interact with the female body and female experiences (Constellations and Notes to Self), Doireann Ní Ghríofa interacts with being haunted by an eighteen-century poet (A Ghost in the Throat) and Fintan O’Toole interacts with Irish history (We Don’t Know Ourselves). This is a book that needed to be written. We are consuming sport in ever-greater gulpfuls – often blindly. The ‘coverage’ of sport is vast: newspapers, magazines, books, a whole raft of TV channels in many languages, websites, podcasts, blogs, radio stations, hourly sports bulletins with every news cycle. Why is that, and what does it mean? The book does not romanticise or idealise sport. Sport has a dark side and is rife with greed, corruption, sexism, homophobia, nationalism and a raft of toxic masculine behaviour – and the author interrogates his own behaviour and attitudes in respect of some of these. On the other hand, in sport – as in art – people can forge their own identities in grace, imagination and the possibility of what may be. This contradictory duality and the cognitive dissonance it carries with it is one of the most fascinating aspects of sport. Sport, like story, is mostly about loss. Ultimately, sport, like story, is about what happens to the fans outside the white lines and, for the readers off the page.
Author: Ben Mathis-Lilley Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 154170035X Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
A fan’s search for the truth about American history, human nature, and whether Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh will keep his job Being a University of Michigan football fan should be joyful. Michigan is an elite academic institution whose football team boasts forty-three Big Ten championships. But these days, college football is complicated. The NCAA is corrupt and exploitative, and Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State. It’s hard not to wonder, as Slate writer and superfan Ben Mathis-Lilley does in this book: Why are we doing this? The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums. Is it embarrassing to care about what happens in a game? Why is Jim Harbaugh like that? Is it somehow Thomas Jefferson’s fault? This book explores all these questions and many more. Against the backdrop of a quickly changing sport and country, The Hot Seat is an exploration of the all-consuming culture of fandom, and why it matters.
Author: David Shields Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1681376423 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 169
Book Description
In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years. David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.” The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.” Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “Just when you think Shields couldn’t rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.”
Author: Andrew C. Billings Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated ISBN: 1544393156 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Communication and Sport: Surveying the Field provides students with an understanding of sports media, rhetoric, culture, and organizations through an examination of a wide range of topics. Authors Andrew C. Billings and Michael L. Butterworth address everything from youth to amateur to professional sports through varied lenses, including mythology, community, and identity. A comprehensive focus on communication scholarship gives attention to the ways that sports produce, maintain, or resist cultural attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics. The Fourth Edition includes new interviews with prominent figures in the field and new discussions on current events like the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Author: Noah Cohan
Author: Noah Cohan
Author: Noah Liljengren Cohan
Author: Aaron Baker
Author: Carrie Tipton
Author: David Foster Wallace
Author: David Foster Wallace
Author: Tadhg Coakley
Author: Ben Mathis-Lilley
Author: David Shields
Author: Andrew C. Billings