Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature (368-0-20)

Topic

Literature as Play: Sports and The Literary Arts

Instructors

Smith William Yarberry

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L04: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Whether looking to popular TV shows, Heated Rivalry and Yellowjackets, or to surreal short stories featuring mutant soccer players, we find that literature shares a variety of playful connections with games and competitive sports. Both writing and athletics, for instance, are often considered leisure activities, each follow their own set of rules, and the two equally rely on different types of participation in the forms of viewer and player, reader and writer. Beyond that, no known culture exists without storytelling or games. In this course, we will ponder, deepen, and lengthen this list of similarities as we explore stories, poems, essays, films and shows that have engaged with different athletic activities from a range of perspectives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do different social and cultural identities affect narratives told about athletes? What literary and other media forms are best able to capture the movement, precision, viewpoints, or play of a given sport? We'll read skateboarding sonnets by an ex-pro skater turned poet, watch fictionalized worlds of boxing and queer body-building play out on screen, and check out the novel Tapping the Source, by "the godfather of ‘Surf Noir,'" before watching Keanu Reeves in the cult-classic film it inspired, Point Break. From wrestling to football, field hockey to baseball, writers have long been invested in athletics as both spectator and player, commentator and character. By reading and watching, discussing and writing, our course will uncover the athletes, real and fictional, that have kept the impulse to play alive within the literary arts and beyond.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro