Sport in Journalism and Fiction in the United States Today

Thesis (M.A.) aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Amerikanistik - Kultur und Landeskunde, Note: 1,0, Universität Osnabrück, 50 Eintragungen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Englisch, Anmerkungen: This "Magisterarbeit" analyzes the status and cultural meaning of mass spectator sports as a cultural artifact in the USA (especially Baseball and American Football) by examining texts from the last decades written by both literary writers and journalists. By analyzing 6 novels from the last decades and a corpus of journalistic writing on these sports, the paper studies how American sports are considered to reflect and form American national character and cultural values by writers from different... , Abstract: This book with the title „Sports in Journalism and Fiction in the United States Today" by Karsten Senkbeil analyzes the imagery and rhetoric in the public representation of the two most popular American sports, namely Baseball and American Football. The research is twofold: on the one hand, a corpus consisting of journalistic texts which appeared on the internet and dealt with one of these sports was assembled and quantitative and qualitative analyses of the rhetoric in these texts was executed with software tools from Corpus Linguistics. Central concern was the analysis in respect of national ideology and myth, commercialization and imagery if heroism. On the other hand, a hermeneutic literary analysis of works by contemporary American authors (DeLillo, Coover, Roth and others), which had sport as a central topic, examined whether and how the imagery and rhetoric found in the corpus analysis was mirrored and critically dealt with on a literary level. Results are manifold. Both sports, the modern and aggressive American Football and the pastoral, conservative baseball, turn out to by recognized as emblematic expressions of typical American values. As 'national pastimes' they are more than distractive spectacles but inherit and re-enact parts of American national