Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature
A game-changing book on Canada’s contributions to sport literature, Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature edited by Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp to be released May 30, 2018. Join Angie Abdou on May 31st at Fernie Distillers for a talk (15 minutes) and discussion, and then socialize over the distillers' fancy drinks.
How many minutes of each day do you spend playing sports, watching sports, checking stats, updating your fantasy league roster, driving your kids to games, and reading news stories about your favourite teams? Sports play an important—and sometimes time-consuming—role in our lives. But sports are about more than just athletic skills, wins and losses—sports are also a microcosm of our wider society.
Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp noticed an abundance of sport literature courses cropping up across Canada and the lack of secondary texts on the topic motivated them to bring together Writing the Body in Motion—acollection of introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributors consider recurring themes, including how sport relates to the body, violence, gender, sexuality, heroism, the environment,redemption, mortality, religion, and place. Included in their discussion are a number of books many Canadians have read:
Indian Horse. Sam McKegney and Trevor Phillips discuss the decolonial potential of Richard Wagamese’s hockey novel, now a feature film.
Shoeless Joe. Fred Mason breaks down the mythic function of sport and magic realism in W. P. Kinsella’s classic baseball novel.
Icefields. Cory Willard confronts the fragility of the environment and threats to sustainability in Thomas Wharton’s mountaineering novel set in Jasper.
The Good Body. Jamie Dopp analyzes the connections between Buddhism and hockey in Bill Gaston’s novel.
From the introduction
Most of us, at some point in our lives, participate in sport, and many of usalso interact with sport as consumers by attending or watching sportingevents or following sports in the media. Sport literature courses give us achance to think critically about that consumption.