We Average Unbeautiful Watchers

Sports fandom—often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation—determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays. While it may seem that sports narratives are “written” by athletes and journalists, Cohan demonstrates that fans are not passive consumers but rather function as readers and writers who appropriate those narratives and generate their own stories in building their sense of identity. Critically reading stories of sports fans’ self-definition across genres, from the novel and the memoir to the film and the blog post, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers recovers sports games as sites where fan-authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative itself. Fan stories demonstrate how unscripted sporting entertainments function as identity-building narratives—which, in turn, enhances our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life stories. Building on the work of sports historians, theorists of fan behavior, and critics of American literature, Cohan shows that humanistic methods are urgently needed for developing nuanced critical conversations about athletics. Sports take shape as stories, and it is scholars in the humanities who can best identify how they do so—and why that matters for American culture more broadly.

Sports fandom—often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation—determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays. While it may seem that sports narratives are “written” by athletes and journalists, Cohan demonstrates that fans are not passive consumers but rather function as readers and writers who appropriate those narratives and generate their own stories in building their sense of identity. Critically reading stories of sports fans’ self-definition across genres, from the novel and the memoir to the film and the blog post, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers recovers sports games as sites where fan-authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative itself. Fan stories demonstrate how unscripted sporting entertainments function as identity-building narratives—which, in turn, enhances our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life stories. Building on the work of sports historians, theorists of fan behavior, and critics of American literature, Cohan shows that humanistic methods are urgently needed for developing nuanced critical conversations about athletics. Sports take shape as stories, and it is scholars in the humanities who can best identify how they do so—and why that matters for American culture more broadly.

Baseball has long been viewed as the Great American Pastime, so it is no surprise that the sport has inspired many Hollywood films and television series. But how do these works depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society? This study offers an extensive look at nearly one hundred years of baseball-themed movies, documentaries, and TV shows. Film and sports scholar Aaron Baker examines works like A League of their Own (1992) and Sugar (2008), which dramatize the underrepresented contributions of female and immigrant players, alongside classic baseball movies like The Natural that are full of nostalgia for a time when native-born white men could use the game to achieve the American dream. He further explores how biopics have both mythologized and demystified such legendary figures as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela. The Baseball Film charts the variety of ways that Hollywood presents the game as integral to American life, whether showing little league as a site of parent-child bonding or depicting fans’ lifelong love affairs with their home teams. Covering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976), this book offers an essential look at one of the most cinematic of all sports.

Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify. The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture. This book unearths the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.

Designed for courses taught at the introductory level in Canadian universities and colleges, this new anthology provides a rich selection of literary texts. Unlike many other such anthologies, it includes literary non-fiction as well as poetry, short fiction, and drama. In each genre the anthology includes a vibrant mix of classic and contemporary works. Each work is accompanied by an introductory headnote and by explanatory notes, and each genre is prefaced by a substantial introduction. Companion websites include genre-specific quizzes and discussion questions for students and instructors. Pedagogically current and uncommon in its breadth of representation, The Broadview Introduction to Literature invites students into the world of literary study in a truly distinctive way. The second edition of The Broadview Anthology of Literature: Literary Non-Fiction includes new essays by Ivan Coyote, David Foster Wallace, Richard Wagamese, and more.

This book is a multifaceted reflection on sport. It is part memoir, outlining Tadhg Coakley’s time as a player and fan of sport and how it has shaped his life. It is also a book of essays critiquing several aspects of sport, both good and bad, and showing its influence in the wider world. It is also a work of auto-fiction, wherein Coakley uses his novelistic abilities to chart narratives, personal and public. It is, finally, a work of scholarship, brilliantly interweaving the author’s view of a life spent inside and outside the white lines with the cultural discourse of previous writers and thinkers on the many themes explored. The book is an exploration and explanation of what sport means, why it is the world's largest single consumer product and such a dominant/pervasive presence in Irish culture. Why, for example, were the terms ‘European Championships’ and ‘Premier League’ the top Google searches in Ireland for 2021? Why was Christian Eriksen the most searched person? In this book Tadhg Coakley interacts with sport in the way that Olivia Laing interacts with isolation (The Lonely City) Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine interact with the female body and female experiences (Constellations and Notes to Self), Doireann Ní Ghríofa interacts with being haunted by an eighteen-century poet (A Ghost in the Throat) and Fintan O’Toole interacts with Irish history (We Don’t Know Ourselves). This is a book that needed to be written. We are consuming sport in ever-greater gulpfuls – often blindly. The ‘coverage’ of sport is vast: newspapers, magazines, books, a whole raft of TV channels in many languages, websites, podcasts, blogs, radio stations, hourly sports bulletins with every news cycle. Why is that, and what does it mean? The book does not romanticise or idealise sport. Sport has a dark side and is rife with greed, corruption, sexism, homophobia, nationalism and a raft of toxic masculine behaviour – and the author interrogates his own behaviour and attitudes in respect of some of these. On the other hand, in sport – as in art – people can forge their own identities in grace, imagination and the possibility of what may be. This contradictory duality and the cognitive dissonance it carries with it is one of the most fascinating aspects of sport. Sport, like story, is mostly about loss. Ultimately, sport, like story, is about what happens to the fans outside the white lines and, for the readers off the page.

A fan’s search for the truth about American history, human nature, and whether Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh will keep his job Being a University of Michigan football fan should be joyful. Michigan is an elite academic institution whose football team boasts forty-three Big Ten championships. But these days, college football is complicated. The NCAA is corrupt and exploitative, and Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State. It’s hard not to wonder, as Slate writer and superfan Ben Mathis-Lilley does in this book: Why are we doing this? The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums. Is it embarrassing to care about what happens in a game? Why is Jim Harbaugh like that? Is it somehow Thomas Jefferson’s fault? This book explores all these questions and many more. Against the backdrop of a quickly changing sport and country, The Hot Seat is an exploration of the all-consuming culture of fandom, and why it matters.

In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years. David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.” The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.” Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “Just when you think Shields couldn’t rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.”