ENGL 224 - Sports and Literature

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
In this course, we will explore the relationship between athletics and narrative in order to think together about the various cultural meanings contained within the capacious term “sports.” We will primarily focus on novels and short stories from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including work by Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Grace Paley, Annie Proulx, and Chad Harbach, as well as a few poems, essays, and films. Along with looking at different literary representations of specific sports and complicating our understanding of what qualifies as a sport (rodeo? rock climbing?), we will engage with issues of race, gender, and inequality in athletic spaces, fandom as community and nation defining, and sports stories that function as coming-of-age stories.

This course is appropriate for new students.