jrn573de - week fifteen lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Fifteen


Week Fifteen - 1

● There are no more response papers due this semester.

● One written assignment to go: the major paper on a book, which is due May 9, 2015, at 11:59 p.m.

● Please make sure to carefully craft your analysis of the work within the context of material from the semester.


Week Fifteen - 2

● We close the semester’s Discussion Board with a call for an idea on the subject you would like to pursue if given the time and support to compose a work of sports literature similar to the stories we’ve reviewed in class.


Week Fifteen - 3

● First, consider Messenger’s trinity of sports heroes: ritual, college and popular.

● Generally, whatever subject you select to pursue would fit into one of those categories, with a degree of hybridization.


Week Fifteen - 4

● Think of the articles from The New Yorker anthology when developing the idea.

● Consider whether the best stories emerged from mainstream or on the margins.

● Most of all, think of the interiority of the subject.


Week Fifteen - 5

● This returns us to the opening week when we read Roger Angell’s work titled “The Interior Stadium.”

● That work featured one of the most powerful openings in sports literature history:


Week Fifteen - 6● "Sports are too much with us. Late and soon,

sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.”


Week Fifteen - 7

● The key for us as writers is to break through the images that flow across our screens and get to the interior of the thing.

● That’s what transforms sports writing into sports literature.


Week Fifteen - 8

● Coverage reflects action, but really doesn’t present detail outside a bundle of statistics available to any fan to dissect.

● Coverage gives us heroes, usually of the popular and college hero variety, but doesn’t convey the modern ritual sports hero all that much.


Week Fifteen - 9

● The role of the writer in Sports Literature is to pierce the surface and shift the focus of the story to the interior of the thing, whether it is a player, a game, a golf course, or anything associated with sports that cannot be readily observed.

● And it must hold something else.


Week Fifteen - 10

● And that added dimension is art.

● Sports literature uses sports as an instrument to tell the larger, universal story of human civilization and experience.

● That’s what makes it hard but necessary to pursue.


Week Fifteen - 11

● Thank you for a lively semester.

● Please now consider this final assignment for life:

● Always read, always read challenging material and always seek to get to the interior of things when covering sports.

jrn573de - week fifteen lecture

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