ludere, to play

This is the blog for Performative Play: The Literature and Culture of Sport, an optional course for postgraduate students at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. It is being offered by Supriya Chaudhuri in Semester 1/3, 2011 (July to November). Students are expected to post comments and questions, and to report on their reading. Here is an outline of the course.

Week 1: Literature and Sport: theory, philosophy, practice
We shall look at the theoretical and philosophical assumptions behind the cultural categories of literature and sport, asking what they have in common as mimetic practices directed towards pleasure. We shall begin with the relation between games and play, looking at Plato’s comments in the Republic and going on to Johann Huizinga’s classic work Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. At the same time, we will consider the views of Kant, Schiller and Nietzsche on art as a form of play, as against Bakhtin’s influential model of the social function of play. Taking off from John Stuart Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures and between intellectual, aesthetic and moral ends, we will examine the long-held opposition between the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’, and the function of the performative in the aesthetics of both literature and sport.

Week 2: The Greek paideia and the cult of the athlete
We shall be looking at a variety of texts and extracts from Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle and their Roman successors to examine the nature of the Greek educational ideal, the emphasis on sport in the Greek way of life, the Olympic Games, the contemporary critiques of these models, and the cultivation of large-scale spectator sports, including gladiatorial combats, as a means of exercising popular control. The gendering of sport will be looked at in the context of Sparta.

Week 3: Sport, Ethics, England, and Empire
We will examine the emergence of sport as a critical component of the ideologies of empire and nation, from its inclusion in English public school education, as found in Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (1857). We shall also consider other variants of public school mores, such as in Kipling’s Stalky and Co (1899), the link between the British Empire and the Great Game in Kim (1910), and the postmodern, postnational depictions of quidditch in the Harry Potter series and the tournament in HP and the Goblet of Fire, 2003. Theoretical and historical frames may be taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and J. A. Mangan.

Week 4: Professionalism in Sport: Gentlemen vs Players
The text for this week will be George Bernard Shaw’s novel about a professional prizefighter and his entry into London society, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886). We shall attempt to relate this work to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of sport, noting the distinctions he introduces between game and sport, and his treatment of class.

Week 5: Sport, Aesthetics and Politics: what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
They are still playing cricket at night
They are playing the game in the dark.
They're on guard for a backlash of light
They are losing the ball at long leg.
They are trying to learn how the dark
Helps the yorker knock back the off-peg;
They are trying to find a new trick
Where the ball moves to darkness from light.
They're determined to paint the scene black
But a blackness compounded by white.
They are dying to pass a new law
Where blindness is deemed to be sight
They are still playing cricket at night.

I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad.
Same author: guess who before googling it?

We may begin with Hugh de Selincourt’s 1924 novel, The Cricket Match, and other ‘classic’ writing about cricket, eg by Neville Cardus, and contrast it with CLR James’s account of cricket, colonialism and the politics of sport in Beyond a Boundary (1963). We will move on to social histories of cricket produced by, eg, Ramachandra Guha, Ashis Nandy and Mike Marqusee, setting them against two postcolonial cricket novels, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman (2011). Viewing: Lagaan (2001).

Week 6: Modernity and Sport
The text for the this week will be Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 long story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made into a film in 1962. We may set this against the triumphalism of Chariots of Fire (1981) and the history of the modern Olympics.

Week 7: Modernism and Sport: anxiety, desire, and postmodernist fantasy
This week’s texts will include Bernard Malamud’s first novel, about a baseball star, The Natural (1952), and Moti Nandy’s modernist stories for the young, Striker, Stopper and Kony. We may view the film of Kony (1984), to discuss issues involving women in sport, such as the wish-fulfilment fantasy, Bend it Like Beckham (2003), and the later Chak De! India.

Week 8: The Body in Pain
Texts for consideration will be chosen from Norman Mailer’s The Fight (1975), Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing (1987), and F. X. Toole’s stories about boxing, Rope Burns (2000). Viewing will include On the Waterfront (1954), Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1985), and Million Dollar Baby (2000). The question of gender raised by the last text will be further explored with reference to the journalism of Djuna Barnes, Payoshni Mitra’s documentary, The Bold and the Beautiful, and the career of M.C. Mary Kom.

Week 9: Studies in a Dying Culture
The texts for this week will be Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go (1951) and Munshi Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khilari (1925), together with Satyajit Ray’s film version (1977). We will examine the parallels between game-playing and cultural performance and the political allegory encoded through the game.

Week 10: The Opium of the Masses
We will consider the nature of football fandom with reference to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and discuss issues of popular culture, racism and sexism in Tim Parks’s A Season with Verona (2002) and Laurent Mauvignier’s In the Crowd (2006). Viewing may include Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and The Damned United (2009)

Week 11: Humour
The texts for this week will be P G Wodehouse, The Golf Omnibus (1973), a collection of stories written over a long period, and Stephen Potter, Gamesmanship (1947) and The Complete Golf Gamesmanship (1968)

Week 12: The Book as Game
Starting with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), we shall consider the relation of books to games as well as the conversion of books to games in the form of computer games, for instance. The nature of narrative, the function of representation, the problem of genre and many of the issues raised in the first week will be re-opened.

After the second half of the course, students will be required to present term papers on subjects/texts of their choice. They need not confine themselves to the texts under review, but must provide me with a copy of the text they wish to discuss.

An International Conference on ‘Sport and the Nation’ will be held in January 2012.