ENGL3091: The Literature and Film of Baseball

Baseball is the national pastime, often evoked with Mom and apple pie in a trinity of American-ness. How do Americans represent something they see as so quintessentially themselves? In this class, we will look at the variety and complexity of answers given to that question, from sunny nostalgia, to valorization of the individual, valorization of the team, depictions of the dark side of the American dream, critiques of racial relations, and an approach that strives to eliminate both the poetry and the hand-wringing with a long hard look at numbers and facts. In this journey, we will study and participate in a number of ways that literature teaches us to understand society and ourselves. We will examine the idea of American pastoral and anti-pastoral. We will use the great variety of ways to write about baseball as a platform to consider how we come to know and believe. Throughout the course, we will examine the way baseball writing treats race and gender. We will also look at excerpts of films made from some of the texts. Comparing the films to the literature allows us to discuss what representations of America seem more palatable to producers aiming for a larger audience than literature usually reaches and to highlight ways writing makes arguments that films cannot.

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