Modules

Sport, Literature and Media (EAS3197)

30 credits

Sport has a central place in contemporary culture, yet literature dealing with sport occupies only a marginal position, with novels, plays and poetry struggling to compete with the dominant sports media of TV, film, radio and newspapers. Even sports biographies and autobiographies are more popular than the novel form, which loses its accustomed place as the pre-eminent mode for dealing with individual life-stories. The course looks at various forms of literature – novels, plays, poetry, ‘faction’ – and considers them in relation to the mainstream sports media, asking what literary treatments of sport do differently to these other forms of media. How, for instance, do they negotiate their own space in the marketplace, and what can that tell us about how these forms represent time, space and narrative, and how they position themselves in terms of audience?