Called shots: Baseball as modern American fiction.
Date
1997
Authors
McGimpsey, David Andrew.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
Since the turn of the century, baseball has been a reliable source of inspiration for American authors. More recently, however, baseball has emerged as a dependable product in more upscale sections of the literary marketplace. From bestselling novels turned into strong box-office movies, from PBS documentaries to op-ed pieces in The New York Review of Books, from anthologies of baseball literature to doctoral dissertations, baseball has laid claim to a "literary" identity no other sport and few other products of mass-culture enjoy. Within the borders of this outgrowth, the baseball novel in particular has been shaped into a uniquely self-sustaining companion to the popular sport.
At first glance, the baseball novel tends to have a simple function; the game is used as a nostalgic locator for simpler times, more coherent passions, and healthy, patriotic fun. But on closer examination, baseball fiction, like the game it depends upon for its appeal, is defined by its conflicts: the perfect game is played by imperfect people; an imagined pastoral game takes shelter under the big-city dome; "America's game" closes its ranks to a select few; the idea of a game "for the kids" is pressured by the anxious restructuring of the American family. The very idea of "baseball literature" itself is conflicted as the cultured assurances of its identity as a bona fide literary art are articulated in and around a constituency with strong anti-intellectual traditions.
The most common tropes in baseball fiction (baseball as aesthetically and spiritually faultless, baseball as pastoral, baseball as meritocracy, baseball as father and son reunion) would not appear as often as they do if these claims were self-evidently true. When an author chooses to use a baseball setting in some way he or she will end up advancing, interrogating and/or condemning these tropes. (Unlike baseball players, baseball-novelists are in full control of the outcomes of their "games.") While baseball fiction finally eludes a simple, generic classification, taken as a whole it offers a well-contained, evocative, metonymic critique of the conflicts inherent in the ideas of America at play. Understood as a cultural product, baseball fiction offers a unique perspective on the entertainment industry, literary trends, and the state of the nation in the Reagan/Bush era.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1997.
At first glance, the baseball novel tends to have a simple function; the game is used as a nostalgic locator for simpler times, more coherent passions, and healthy, patriotic fun. But on closer examination, baseball fiction, like the game it depends upon for its appeal, is defined by its conflicts: the perfect game is played by imperfect people; an imagined pastoral game takes shelter under the big-city dome; "America's game" closes its ranks to a select few; the idea of a game "for the kids" is pressured by the anxious restructuring of the American family. The very idea of "baseball literature" itself is conflicted as the cultured assurances of its identity as a bona fide literary art are articulated in and around a constituency with strong anti-intellectual traditions.
The most common tropes in baseball fiction (baseball as aesthetically and spiritually faultless, baseball as pastoral, baseball as meritocracy, baseball as father and son reunion) would not appear as often as they do if these claims were self-evidently true. When an author chooses to use a baseball setting in some way he or she will end up advancing, interrogating and/or condemning these tropes. (Unlike baseball players, baseball-novelists are in full control of the outcomes of their "games.") While baseball fiction finally eludes a simple, generic classification, taken as a whole it offers a well-contained, evocative, metonymic critique of the conflicts inherent in the ideas of America at play. Understood as a cultural product, baseball fiction offers a unique perspective on the entertainment industry, literary trends, and the state of the nation in the Reagan/Bush era.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1997.
Keywords
American Studies., Literature, American.