Sporting Realities
Critical Readings of the Sports Documentary
Samantha N Sheppard editor Travis Vogan editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Nebraska Press
Published:1st Sep '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Despite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration.
Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary’s cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. It considers and critiques the sports documentary’s visible and powerful position in contemporary culture and forges novel connections between the study of nonfiction media and sport.
"With its broad look at different examples from creative, aesthetic, industrial and geographical points of view, Sporting Realities aims to be a reference point in sports and television studies more generally by offering an anthology on the cultural dynamics of memory and sport’s representation within contemporary audiovisual systems."—Paolo Carelli, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies
“The contributions to this anthology offer a critical and methodologically varied take on sport documentaries’ industrial, aesthetic, and ideological potentials. They combine detailed textual analysis with pertinent theoretical and historical reflection. Thus, they give a convincing account of both the specific formal procedures of sports documentaries and their strong entanglement with much broader dynamics, be it memorial culture, intersectionality, or branding strategies.”—Markus Stauff, coeditor of Filmgenres: Sportfilm
“This collection fills a void in sports studies and film studies. It represents a bridge between these two important fields at a moment when sports documentaries are taking up more and more cultural space. It represents an important scholarly intervention that will propel conversations about these specific films, about the broader genre, and about the narratives that circulate in and around these representations. At the same time, this book will be useful for classes, providing critical tools for discussing a diversity of sports documentary films.”—David J. Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the Field
ISBN: 9781496217578
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
246 pages