LVA 2448 - Sports & Literature

Institution:

Babson College

Subject:

Description:

3.00 credits LVA2448 Sports and Literature (LIT) (Intermediate Liberal Arts) "Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day. How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent " So says Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in his memoir about how long-distance running influenced his livelihood as a novelist. This course will examine the intersections of sport and literature, guided by the many and varied representations that fiction writers, poets and essayists have made of individual and team sports and their players. We will study theoretical examinations of sport and its roles and values in culture; for example, Roland Barthes's critical question "What is Sport " and Theodor Adorno's assertion that "sport is the imageless counterpart to practical life". We will study a portrait of boxing and gentlemanly conduct in William Hazlitt's nineteenth-century The Fight; "people who risk death for a living" in Alison Kennedy's On Bullfighting; Conor O'Callaghan's poems about the socio-political perils of playing cricket in Ireland, where English games were banned for a long time. In this course you will work with such topic areas as sport, nationalism and fascism; sport and gender; sport and violence; sport and class distinctions. Above all you will examine the efforts of diverse writers to capture the workings, euphoria and 'meaning' of sport in their work. Other texts may include Nick Hornby's novel of soccer fanaticism in Fever Pitch; Richard Ford's The Sportswriter; and yes, baseball through John Updike's writing on the Boston Red Sox. Prerequisite: RHT and Foundation AHF and HSF

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.babson.edu

Phone Number:

(781) 235-1200

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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