ASRC 2505 - Literature, Sport, and Ideology

(crosslisted) ENGL 2751
(LA-AS)

Spring. 3 credits. Student option grading.

G. Farred.

There is a sentence that is 65 pages long in Don DeLillo’s novel “Underworld.” Nothing but an unending series of elliptical thoughts, phrases, incomplete thoughts, fragments. Only a novel about the “shot heard around the world,” we might argue, could produce such a sentence. We will read DeLillo’s novel, and not only to see if this sentence actually exists. There is nothing more ideological than sport -there is a good reason why some critics prefer to call it “war by other means” - in this course we will explore the connection amongst sport, ideology and literature. We will read novels, historical memoirs, short stories and works that defy categorization. We will wander the globe, from cricket in the Caribbean (CLR James) to football in Latin America (Eduardo Galeano, “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”), books about baseball (“The Boys of Summer”) and a story about Roger Federer.