JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Two Lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Spring 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

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JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Two Lecture