jrn573de - sports literature: week two lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Two


Week Two - 1

● This week we start reading the assigned text on the role of sport and play in American literature.

● The purpose is reveal how sport and play are cornerstones of American literary history.


Week Two - 2

● American writers began embedding sport and play in their work as early as the 19th century.

● That means the tradition of writing about sports and seeing the importance of sports in daily life extends deep into the history of American letters.


Week Two - 3

● In short, sports hold an important place in America’s cultural history, first in books and later, of course, on radio, film, television and online.


Week Two - 4

● Over the course of the 19th centuries and early 20th centuries, writers installed what the scholar Christian K. Messenger describes as three specific types of sports heroic figures.


Week Two - 5

● The Ritual Sports Hero● The Popular Sports Hero● The School Sports Hero


Week Two - 6

● We will examine in detail each sports literature hero type as we move through the first sequence of the semester, but here’s a summary.


Week Two - 7

● The Ritual Sports Hero: Seeks self-awareness through competition against personal obstacles such as fear, physical obstacles such as nature and human adversaries.

● This is the oldest of the sports hero, with origins that date to the ancient Greeks.


Week Two - 8

● In 19th century America, the Ritual Sports Hero battled against obstacles presented by the frontier.

● The Ritual Sports Hero competed for “growth of the spirit,” according to Messenger.


Week Two - 9

● The Popular Sports Hero: With roots in hunting and horse riding, this heroic figure made an easy transition from the frontier to the industrialized culture of the mid to late 19th century.

● By the turn of the 20th century, the popular sports hero became the central figure in drawing huge crowds.


Week Two - 10

● The emergence of a mass media – daily newspaper – stoked the image of the popular sports hero combined with the first golden age of spectator sports to embed the popular sports hero in the national consciousness.

● The Popular Sports Hero competed for “recognition and reward,” according to Messenger.


Week Two - 11

● The School Sports Hero: As the frontier disappeared after the Civil War, eastern college students had little opportunities to present the concept of manliness.

● Sports such as football emerged to relieve the

status anxiety created by the lack of true opportunities to express physical courage.


Week Two - 12

● Literature soon followed. The school sports hero became a heroic figure who featured both brains and brawn and would be destined for a leadership role under the template authors developed.

● The School Sports Hero competed for “character and recognition,” according to Messenger.


Week Two - 13

● Messenger simplifies the distinctions among the three as follows:

● “For the Ritual Sports Hero, sport is a revelation; for the School Hero, a test; and for the Popular Hero, a contest.”


Week Two - 14

● The three heroic figures are still evident in contemporary sports literature, so make sure to think about the structural trinity presented here in terms of heroic types revealed in sports literature.


Week Two - 15

● Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne showed the importance of play in American life through their work in the 19th century.


Week Two - 16

Nathaniel Hawthorne


Week Two - 17

● Hawthorne’s canonical The Scarlet Letter (1850) describes sports as the activity that revealed “the great honest face of the people.”

● Writing about America’s Puritanical past in that work about a 17th century scandal, Hawthorne railed against the prohibitions that banned sports.


Week Two - 18

● People colonizing the continent needed sport “for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them.”


Week Two - 19

● Before Hawthorne, Washington Irving captured the American sense of play and its antecedents.

● Writing in the first third of the 19th century about 18th century subjects, his works featured itemized accounts of how people played and organized games.


Week Two - 20

● James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau likewise saw play as essential to American’s historical and contemporary life.


Week Two - 21

● In The Pioneers, Cooper writes about sporting rituals of hunting and fishing that are overseen by the main character who seeks to embed the concept of fair play in his community.


Week Two - 22

● Thoreau sees sport as an activity that seeks a higher meaning.


Week Two - 23

● Messenger writes that Thoreau saw sports as a path to a “deeper, more integrated knowledge of how a man’s more primitive instinctual needs and experiences may inform his character and develop discipline.”


Week Two - 24

● In summary, these writers saw in sport the platform where an idealized life could emerge.

● And that perception of an idealized life is certainly something that persisted for almost a century in sports literature.

jrn573de - sports literature: week two lecture

Education

sports literature week

popular sports hero

ritual sports hero

school sports hero

importance of sports

sports literature hero

sports literature rich

american literature