America, rightly or wrongly, is a sports crazy country and we often see games as a metaphor or a symbol of what we are as a people.” — Bill Clinton
Americans are obsessed with winning. Nowhere is this more obvious than the realm of professional sporting events. Since its inception in 1896, the U.S. has sent hundreds of athletes to the Olympics and brought back even more gold medals. These successes not only helped the U.S. secure their position as an acclaimed world competitor, but they also revealed the lengths Americans went to in order to bring home the gold. Past histories reveal that some Americans will sacrifice their integrity to guarantee a victory. Why do we desire to win so badly? How do notions of superiority inform our national and personal narratives? What changes when athletes win? These questions will guide our discussions as scholars, spectators, and perhaps even participants, as we look at the U.S. involvement in sports and sporting scandals as depicted in literary and visual cultures.
Beginning with an analysis of one of America’s favorite pastimes, baseball, we’ll consult documentaries by Ken Burns and sports writing by Peter Gammons to learn how the early rules governing this sport determined who counted as American or not. Next we’ll encounter political memoirs like that of Jackie Robinson to see how each used their respective sports to address racial and gender inequalities. Finally, turning to more recent events like the media’s portrayal of Serena Williams and Cam Newton, we will direct our attention to how the training and expectations made of athletes changes how we conceive of what it means to be human.
The examination of literary, visual, and auditory materials will show us how different mediums represent athletes and their relationship to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. We will study memoirs, sports articles, documentaries, music videos, and radio broadcasts in this course. In addition to participation, students will write two papers (5-6pp) and complete a creative final project where they will try their hand at documenting an understudied U.S. sports scandal of their choice.
Photograph: “The battle Crib [Cribb] and Molineaux,” 1811. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL.
