Sport in Journalism and Fiction in the United States Today

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Osnabrück, language: English, abstract: This book with the title 'Sports in Journalism and Fiction in the United States Today' by Karsten Senkbeil analyzes the imagery and rhetoric in the public representation of the two most popular American sports, namely Baseball and American Football. The research is twofold: on the one hand, a corpus consisting of journalistic texts which appeared on the internet and dealt with one of these sports was assembled and quantitative and qualitative analyses of the rhetoric in these texts was executed with software tools from Corpus Linguistics. Central concern was the analysis in respect of national ideology and myth, commercialization and imagery if heroism. On the other hand, a hermeneutic literary analysis of works by contemporary American authors (DeLillo, Coover, Roth and others), which had sport as a central topic, examined whether and how the imagery and rhetoric found in the corpus analysis was mirrored and critically dealt with on a literary level. Results are manifold. Both sports, the modern and aggressive American Football and the pastoral, conservative baseball, turn out to by recognized as emblematic expressions of typical American values. As 'national pastimes' they are more than distractive spectacles but inherit and re-enact parts of American national ideology. Militaristic and imperialistic undertones are often found in the corpus and these attitudes are critically and ironically reflected by literary authors. An examination of religious metaphors showed how mass media spectator sport has acquired a status of quasi-religious myth-making, its values and belief systems intermixing with and superimposing on classic religious and national myths. Commercialization in sports and economic globalization is greeted with suspicion by both sports journalists and authors. Instead, American professional sport turns out to be a spectacle built around folk heroes, whose status and media representation shows how the American public cherishes individual success. As 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' heroes athletes succeed by embodying genius and creativity, at the same time orderliness and conservatism.