Fantasy sports: Athletics and identity in postmodern American literature, 1967--2008

Over the last four decades, beginning with the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967, American sports have undergone many of the same transformations that have marked postmodernity in culture at large: the exponential growth of sports media; increased focus on performative, rather than competitive, acts; epistemological and ontological instability; and an embrace of the global and commercial over the local and sacred. This project analyzes the representation of sports in American literature during this span, reading literary texts in synthesis with popular-culture sports narratives in which sports enthusiasts construct their own "fantasies" of the athletic body. While mythic archetypes of sports heroism continue to shape these constructions, emerging narrative platforms (including cable television, rotisserie and fantasy leagues, and fan weblogs) have offered new ways of reading the sporting subject. "Fantasy Sports" identifies these debates about subjectivity as the primary point of intersection between contemporary sports culture and postmodern literature. In its response to contemporary sports, postmodern literature has turned away from the emphasis on authentic masculinity and autonomy that shaped both modernist and realist traditions of sports literature. By emphasizing the gap between athletic performance and personal identity, postmodern literature frames athletic subjectivity as the product of fraught negotiations among athletes, fans, and the mass media.;The practice of sports, as depicted in these texts, blurs the binary oppositions between man and woman, participant and spectator, amateur and professional, and in-bounds and out-of-play that structure both commercial and cultural sports institutions. Citing theoretical work by Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard, among others, this project reads these practices as strategic and provisional attempts to maintain a measure of autonomy within a sports culture that rigidly polices both identity and behavior. By drawing together postmodern cultural theory, studies of contemporary sports culture, and contemporary sports literature, "Fantasy Sports" identifies a distinct body of fiction, drama, and non-fiction that radically revises the themes, modes of characterization, and narratives at work in the dominant tradition of sports literature. Furthermore, it offers a set of interpretive strategies that better account for the position and power of sports in contemporary culture.