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What 'Sheed Says When He Says "Ball Don't Lie!"
“Pistons Sheed” (Nathan McKee, 2014, Giclee Print, 13 x 19) In my post yesterday, I analyzed the structure of a foul call in an NBA game to show that a foul doesn’t cause the whistle to blow (as the...
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Michael Jordan vs. David Copperfield
At last! A statistical measure of just how much of a bildungsroman a novel (or any story) is! And this indispensable and infallibly useful metric falls into my lap just when I most needed it: in the...
View ArticleTo Protest or Not to Protest: Is that the Question? On Hamlet and Athletic...
Some of you know that I was recently honored to participate in an American Studies Association round table discussion on athletic resistance and fan pleasure. Other panelists included Jennifer Doyle,...
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Writing the Sporting Body
This semester, I’m excited to be teaching two sports-related courses in the same semester for the first time. First, I’ll once again be teaching “Cultures of Basketball.” I taught it for the first...
View ArticleHow to Write the Sporting Body: A Report from the Classroom
How do you write what is taking place in the picture above? Or, what sorts of challenges does athletic performance present to those who would try to capture or convey it in writing? This was the...
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The Fascination of Iverson Crossing Jordan: An Exercise in Praising Athletic...
In my last post, I referred to Hans Umbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty in relation to my University of Michigan Comparative Literature course on Writing the Sporting Body. I mentioned that...
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The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent (Basketball) Knowledge
All my life, I have loved ordering my things. My new Matchbox cars go in one line, and the ones I inherited from my older brothers go in another one, and the ones I found or stole from my friends go...
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Why (and how to) Read CLR James on Cricket
What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know? Over the past month or so, I’ve been reviewing my plans for Global Sports Culture, a course I’ll be teaching for just the second time this fall. I...
View ArticleReading In Praise of Athletic Beauty
Once again I’m teaching Writing the Sporting Body and once again the core text for the course is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty. I’ve made reference to this work in some other...
View Article“Praise” (Reading In Praise of Athletic Beauty)
“Why,” Hans Gumbrecht begins by asking, “should sportslovers learn how to praise athletes and their achievements?” His meditation upon and response to this question occupies the first of the three...
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