We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives Noah Cohan Washington University in St
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Summer 8-15-2015 “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives Noah Cohan Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cohan, Noah, "“We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives" (2015). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 576. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/576 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: William J. Maxwell, Chair Iver Bernstein Gerald Early Wayne Fields Katherine Mooney “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives by Noah Liljengren Cohan A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2015 St. Louis, Missouri Copyright © 2015 by Noah Cohan TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Baseball Fan Behavior as Postmodern Praxis in Don DeLillo’s Underworld ............ 20 Chapter 2: Race in the Basketball Memoir: White Fan Identity and the Eros of “a Black Man’s Game” ...................................... 60 Chapter 3: “It was My Fate, My Destiny, My End, to be a Fan”: Football, Literature, and Mental Illness in A Fan’s Notes and The Silver Linings Playbook .................... 107 Chapter 4: Reimagined Communities: Web-Mediated Sports Fandom and Technogenetic Narrativity ............................... 143 Coda: Articulating “the Gift We are Denied” on Campus: Pedagogies of Sports Fan Narrativity ....................................................................... 205 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 218 Appendix A: E-mail Interviews with Nathaniel Friedman [aka “Bethlehem Shoals”] .............. 237 Appendix B: E-mail Interview with Jessica Luther .................................................................... 242 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4.1: FreeDarko Blog Header Image……………………………………...…153, 170, 190 Figure 4.2: Fire Joe Morgan Blog Header Image ………….…………...…………156, 176, 194 Figure 4.3: Power Forward Blog Header Image ………………………………..…161, 183, 200 Figure 4.4: Brittney Griner Image from Power Forward……….. …………………...………167 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to many people and organizations. I must thank the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis for funding the past year of research via the Dissertation Fellowship. I am grateful to WashU’s Center for Humanities for providing me financial and intellectual backing as a Graduate Fellow in the Fall of 2014. Beyond the scope of my studies, I am indebted to the staff in English Department for their administrative and emotional support throughout graduate school, especially Sarah Hennessey and Kathy Schneider. Similarly, without the assistance of Jennifer Gallinat, Heidi Kolk, Dave Walsh and the American Culture Studies program I never would have finished graduate school. AMCS and its Harvey Fellowship also provided generous funding and a close-knit intellectual community, and made possible my involvement in the American Studies Association. There I discovered a professional network of sports-interested scholars with whom I formed the Sports Studies Caucus, an organization that has been absolutely vital to my scholarly development. Many supportive individuals deserve special recognition for helping me make it this far. I should begin with my dissertation committee, of course, and its chair, William J. Maxwell. Bill has been an ideal adviser in countless ways—a meticulous editor, he always made sure to sharpen my prose as well as my ideas—but perhaps the highest praise I can give him is this: both pragmatic and patient, Bill is the most responsive and responsible academic I have ever met. To Wayne Fields I owe eternal thanks, not only for encouraging me to come to WashU, join the AMCS community, and pursue my interest in sports studies, but also for countless after-class talks about life, death, and literature. I knew Iver Bernstein before I started grad school, but I never could have imagined what an important part of my professional development he would become. I am grateful for Iver’s enthusiasm and support, both for this project and for many other iv academic endeavors. Gerald Early was my scholarly role model before I came to St. Louis, and his mentorship in sports studies has proved as invaluable as his intellectual example. Finally, special thanks go to Katherine Mooney for her collegiality, pedagogical advice, and friendship. Aside from the formal shepherds of this dissertation, I have numerous friends and colleagues to recognize. First, I would like to thank Nick Miller and J.P. Murray for convincing me to launch this project on that spring afternoon in the basement of Duncker Hall. I am further indebted to Philip Sewell, whose guidance and support led to my first publication. My endless gratitude to Meg Dobbins, En Li, Nick Miller, Michael O’Bryan, the members of the Dissertation Writers’ Workshop, and all the readers who reviewed this dissertation in one form or another. Nick, Lauren Barbeau, Kate Fama, Scott Morris, Dan Scallet, and the rest of my friends and AMCS officemates in McMillan Hall provided a sounding board for my ideas as well as plenty of laughs. To all 15 members of my English Department cohort, but especially Jared Klemp, Lauren McCoy, Michael O’Bryan, and Erik Strobl: your friendship has been more valuable than any other aspect of graduate school. To the team of scholar-ballers that is Negative Capability: your beauty is truth. That is all I know on earth, and all I need to know. Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for my family. My dad made me a sports fan. More importantly, he also inspired me think critically about what that means. No one loves stories, or changing their details, more than my mom; I could not understand narrative, or love, without her. To my sisters, I owe thanks for always supportively checking my biases. To my sons, I owe thanks for filling the world with hope and wonder. To Carla, endlessly patient and fiercely determined, I owe every success since age 22. This dissertation, and my life, are dedicated to her. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives by Noah Liljengren Cohan Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2015 Professor William J. Maxwell, Chair “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers” traces the role of the American sports fan across literary genres from the novel to the memoir to the blog post. Representing mass-mediated athletics as fundamentally narrative-based entertainments, I argue that fans function as readers whether they realize it or not. Further, while it may seem that sports narratives are “written” by athletes and assigned meaning by journalists, my project demonstrates that fans appropriate those narratives in diverse ways to form their own sense of identity. Inscribed in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968), David Shields’s Black Planet (1999), and the blog writings of FreeDarko.com (2005-2011), among other texts, these fan narratives show the literary relevance of an influential realm of popular culture too long ignored by critics. In what we might call the literature of American fandom, sports become sites where authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative. Just as importantly, these narratives demonstrate the readerly resonances between the interpretations of live entertainments and of imaginative narratives—connections that enhance our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life narratives. vi “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Reflexive Fans and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives INTRODUCTION Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere–fastest, strongest–and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or the best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis