Sports, Ethics, and Literature

Catalog description

A passing glance at a newspaper sports page is enough to confirm how ethically fraught the sports world is. This course explores the ethical issues that arise in a culture of competition, and it uses a variety of literary texts to ground that exploration. It seeks to provide students with a nuanced understanding of how dependent sports are on narratives, and how a variety of ethical issues underwrite existing narratives about sports. With a focus on "the big three" (baseball, basketball, and football), the course has a U.S. focus but also has opportunities for students to write about other sports and in non-U.S. contexts. The course connects issues in literature to issues that arise in real time as the semester unfolds. Through the readings, students will develop a heightened awareness of how different a sport can look from the "inside," as an athlete or coach. The literature, that is, develops ethical imaginations and helps students think in a more complicated way about one of the most talked-about phenomena in American culture: athletics, at all levels. Units on baseball, basketball, and football focus on issues specific to those sports (e.g., the basketball unit features texts and discussions about Title IX and gender equity in sport; football on violence, injury, and athlete expendability. The course seeks to equip students to have more sophisticated conversations about sports issues, and to be more discerning as spectators and consumers of sports.