"methodology for explicating such relations"

"Warriors, Legends, and Icons: The philosophy and analysis of sports media narrative"

Jeff Cannon, School of Journalism doctoral student

School of Journalism Research Colloquium

Wednesday, November 17, 4:30pm

Ernie Pyle Lounge (2nd Floor)

Ernie Pyle Hall
True stories about sports operate in a unique cultural domain, one long understood to interact with the moral order. This research presentation picks up from Polumbaum and Wieting’s influential methodology for explicating such relations, proposing a broader and deeper structural framework for parsing sports media accounts for cultural meanings. The framework proposed is situated as an operation upon collective memory. Three overarching domains of implicit meaning are proposed: the story’s influence upon the rules of order, the stories we tell, and the iconic values we use to order experience. The framework is finally put to example as was Polumbaum & Wieting’s: in consideration of coverage of golfer Tiger Woods. This paper brings together concepts from Bourdieu, Nora, Morgan, Mitchell, and others to contribute a useful and nuanced heuristic for examining the “cultural meaning” of sports stories, an especially powerful zone of cultural production.

[It's email notifications like these that make me both dreadfully jealous and ecstatically happy that i am not at school.]