Representation of the athlete in sports writing

Abstract

This dissertation explores sports writing with an analysis of Alex Bellos’s Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, Pete Davies’s One Night in Turin, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Kerry Howley’s Thrown, Norman Mailer’s The Fight, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ through the work of Seymour Chatman, Jonathan Culler, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Jakob Lothe, Joseph Campbell, and Donald Morrill to illustrate how there is literary value in the genre, particularly in the depiction of athletes. The first chapter highlights the aestheticisation of athletes and the ways sports writers describe the beauty that is found in sports figures’ movements and skills. In this respect, the analysis focuses on S. K. Wertz’s four qualities that contribute to the aestheticisation of sport and Walter Thomas Schmid’s application of Immanuel Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgements to form a ‘Kantian theory of sport’. The second chapter explores the depiction of the athlete as a hero and an icon. This is primarily done through an application of Joseph Campbell’s hero monomyth, highlighting the dramatic highs and lows that an athlete might experience, together with Joshua Andrew Shuart’s notion of the ‘societal hero’ and how they become popular within communities. Lastly, the third chapter then moves on to how sports writers can represent various aspects of different cultures through their depictions of athletes. This analysis centres around Stuart Hall’s systems of representation and how representation of meaning through language is identified. Additionally, this chapter also applies Roland Barthes’s semiotic view of language and representation, particularly his ideas of denotation and connotation to allow for an analysis of the representation of different cultural traits, together with instances of social struggle. Therefore, this dissertation outlines how despite it being a relatively underappreciated genre by literary theorists, sports writing still possesses literary value, especially within character analysis. This literary value is highlighted in further detail through an analysis of the aforementioned works.