3.0

Average Course Rating

Noam Chomsky once remarked that sport’s primary function is to “deflect people’s attention from things that matter.” But most people love sport! Even Chomsky has admitted to being impressed by the “extensive knowledge that people have of sport … and their self-confidence in discussing it.” Sport matters because of its central place in our culture and because of its ability to create knowledge and self-confidence in so many people who play sport, watch it intensely, talk about it ceaselessly. And it matters because it produces so much high-caliber writing in so many different genres. How does sport inspire such productive discourse? When people write about sport, are they really writing about something else? We tackle these questions by studying how people have written about sport and by doing some sports-writing ourselves. You will read some of the best sports-writing in the canon, and you can offer your own favorites for the class to read. The first project will be to write your own personal narrative about sport. For the next you will enter a controversy about sport from a selection of topics including sports psychology, racism and sexism, corruption, and how the sporting arena is also a theater in which political meanings are enacted and contested. Finally, you will choose an aspect of the sporting world to research: you could do a piece of sports-reporting here at Hopkins; a profile of an athlete; a photo essay; or an analysis of how a particular sport has been brought to life through blogging and other forms of media. The course overall aims to develop your own ability to write with knowledge, self-confidence, and agility about sport and the things that matter beyond sport.