ENGL 198T Senior Seminar

SPORTS MATTERS. In this course, we will focus on sports as a cultural phenomenon as a means to polish sophisticated critical reading, thinking, and writing skills.  We will investigate the centrality of sports and its rhetoric in modern multi-ethnic U.S. culture, allowing us to examine our own assumptions and ideas along with varieties of arguments and questions posed in the assigned readings. We will consider how issues of race, gender, and class are worked out through the rhetoric of sports—for example, in such concepts as the “good sport,” the “level playing field,” or “three strikes.” To this end, we will use sports to help us think about how national belonging is enacted, as well as the ways in which social hierarchies are structured along the lines of class, race and gender. In addition to analytical texts chosen by the instructor, students’ own cultural knowledge and interests will form the basis of their research in this class. Students will develop their own independent research projects based on the readings in the course and their own interests.