Sports Fiction

Despite the fact that many people believe that “sports are for doers, not for thinkers” (Cashmore 2010), thinking and writing about sports boasts a tradition that is more than a hundred and fifty years old. While the earliest form of sports writing, i.e. sports journalism, saw its aim as reporting and chronicling events, novelists, filmmakers or painters also recognized the artistic potential that various sports disciplines offered. Fictional sports writing has always faced an inevitable dilemma, since sports derives most of its fascination from its mode of ‘liveness’; this is one of the reasons why sports fiction always expands its narrative beyond the football pitch, the racecourse or the boxing ring. As a consequence, this genre transcends representations of ‘sports as such’, and instead always situates sports in social and political contexts. Sports can thus be narrated as a utopian model of transgressing power hierarchies, as a substitute battlefield for social oppositions, or as a site on which different conceptions of physical and political bodies are being negotiated.

In this seminar, we will discuss a wide range of novels, short stories and films, as well as an equally wide range of sports that are being represented in these texts.

Please note:

Personal attendance during the first session is mandatory to maintain enrolment status. Please direct all inquiries about vacancies to britkult.fragen.fk15@tu-dortmund.de.

Course requirements will be discussed in the first session.