Winter Session at Rutgers offers students an abundance of academic opportunities. In just a few short weeks, they can earn up to four credits in a small-class, stimulating, fast-paced environment. Resident students or visitors home on holiday break can fulfill a requirement, lighten their spring course loads or explore an elective just for the fun of it.
Professors, too, can choose Winter Session to experiment. That’s why Larry Scanlon, an associate professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences and a scholar of medieval literature, is combining his academic expertise with his lifelong love of athletics to bring “Popular Culture: The Culture of Sport” to Winter Session in New Brunswick.
A former scholastic and collegiate basketball player, Scanlon remains an avid sports fan, especially when it comes to the NFL’s Giants. (“My wife, who is English, doesn’t understand,” he says.) He’s shaped his syllabus, which includes select readings from classical and contemporary literature as well as opportunities to critique a sports movie or two, to provide students with insight into the powerful role that sport has played in the culture of the times – everything from jousting and archery to lawn bowling and quoits, to Monday Night Football and the X-Games.
Students interested in exploring Scanlon’s own version of SportsCenter, or one of more than 100 in-class, online or hybrid courses in New Brunswick, can register through Dec. 9 without a late fee. Information about Winter Session at Rutgers-Newark can be found here and at Rutgers-Camden, here.
Rutgers Today: “Popular Culture: The Culture of Sport” seems a bit far afield from what you regularly teach. Has this been a longstanding interest?
Larry Scanlon: It is and isn’t – far afield, that is. I am an English teacher, specializing in the later Middle Ages. I spend lots of time teaching the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and many of his lesser-known contemporaries. Certainly, that is some distance from American football, the main focus of this course; however, the study of sport comes under the more general heading of popular culture studies, which grew out of the study of folklore, traditionally located in English departments, and just as traditionally, the province of medieval specialists. But that is also not the whole story. Long before I was an English teacher I was sports-crazy kid. When I was not playing sports, I spent a lot of time reading about sports – the sports pages, biographies, histories of the various sports. I have wanted to teach a course on the culture of sports for quite a long time, especially as I watched the proliferation of studies in popular culture in recent years.
Rutgers Today: Does the course cover both amateur and professional sports?
Scanlon: There will be a variety of secondary readings about sports in general in contemporary society, but one of the reasons I decided to concentrate on one particular sport, football, was so that we would be able to examine the social and political significances of sport in all its variety. Amateur versions of the major professional sports are older and more localized; professional sports emerged from these amateur networks and the cultural relations between the two are complicated and fascinating. The key figure bridging these two worlds is the fan, and we will spend lots of time examining the fan’s role. In most conventional understanding of sports, the fan is at the bottom of the hierarchy, the least important, most inessential element. Yet without the fan, almost nothing in modern sports would happen the way it does.
Rutgers Today: How far back in history has sport been a part of culture?
Scanlon: It is pretty safe to assume that sport is as old as human culture itself. Western culture is conventionally thought to begin with the two epic poems of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad tells the story of the fall of the city of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, and it contains extensive descriptions of the funeral games the great hero Achilles holds for his friend Patroclus, who dies in battle. Pindar, one of ancient Greece’s earliest lyric poets, left many victory odes dedicated to athletic champions. Our modern term tournament comes from Old French spoken in the Middle Ages, and it described mock-military games like jousting, which figure very prominently in medieval romances. Sport is a frequent concern in modern literary works. One of the texts we will read is the novel End Zone, by one of America’s leading contemporary writers, Don DeLillo.
Even more interesting to me than sport’s influence on literature is the many ways literary conventions have come to shape our understanding of sport. For example, it’s common for a coach or player to proclaim after a victory, “No one believed in us, but we believed in ourselves.” The literal accuracy of such a statement is generally pretty dubious – but obviously not the point. These athletes and coaches are trying to capture some emotional truth, and they do it by reshaping the events leading to their victory into a narrative in which they begin as an unrecognized and universally despised protagonist only to reveal themselves as triumphant in the end.
Rutgers Today: What is the role of sport today in the U.S.? Is the role different elsewhere?
Scanlon: That is going to be a central question of the course, and I think the answer is basically going to be the same in other countries, in spite of differences. Does sport function as some kind of civic religion, as scholars have argued, offering intricate rituals which effect some form of social cohesion? Does it have the effect of bringing older forms of community into the present, or is it more properly thought of as a purely modern or contemporary phenomenon, essentially a branch of show business, a carefully managed spectacle enforcing class divisions and gender roles? It is notable that the more scholarly or literary treatments tend to be the more skeptical, while the attitudes of reporters and announcers tend to be more celebratory. I want to spend as much time on the celebratory views as on the skeptical ones. It is not so much that I want to get the students to choose. Rather, I want them to explore the relations between the two views, to see where they really differ but also to see where they may share the same assumptions.