LFU:online

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the relationship between literature and sport by exploring a variety of historical and current approaches in American (non-)fiction. Overall, this class is designed to help students become better readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

Any sport is a story playing out before our eyes. Literature shapes how we make sense of sport and sport informs ways of reading. Games, like literary genres, are as varied as the cultures that have produced them. They are connected to fantasies of control, national identities, and processes of self-realization. American writers (and presidents) have taken sports seriously – e.g. Faulkner, Steinbeck, Updike, Kerouac, and Hemingway have worked as sport journalists – and sport offered ways to define American communal and personal responsibility. Writers have used sports (1) as a social context to explore American values and beliefs; (2) as sources of allusion, metaphor, and symbol; and (3) as a cultural phenomenon to explore questions that relate to the body, violence, society, sexuality, heroism, memory, the environment, morality, religion, and place. In this course, we will focus on American sport narratives from the 1800s to the present and read broadly on a wide range of sports in (non-)canonical works.

Lecture inputs, weekly readings/viewings, presentations, group discussions, writing assignments.

Active class participation, home assignments, student presentations, essays and/or term paper.

TBA. As far as possible, course materials and selected primary and secondary sources will be posted on OLAT.

Prerequisite for the Bachelor Program (612): positive completion of compulsory module 10, for BA Lehramt (457): positive completion of compulsory module 13