Full Description
Soccer has long been known as 'the beautiful game'. This multi-disciplinary volume explores soccer, soccer culture, and the representation of soccer in art, film, and literature, using the critical tools of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric.
Including international contributions from scholars of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, and the creative arts, this book begins by investigating the relationship between beauty and soccer and asks what criteria should be used to judge the sport's aesthetic value. Covering topics as diverse as humor, national identity, style, celebrity, and social media, its chapters examine the nature of fandom, the role of language, and the significance of soccer in contemporary popular culture. It also discusses what one might call the 'stylistics' of soccer, analyzing how players, fans, and commentators communicate on and off the pitch, in the press, on social media, and in wider public discourse.
The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer makes for fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, culture, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and society.
Contents
Pep Talk Klopp's Heideggerianism [Simon Critchley] Taking the Field Introduction: Aesthetics, Poetics, Rhetoric, Soccer [Ridvan Askin, Catherine Diederich, and Aline Bieri] First Half: Aesthetics 1. Good Games as Athletic Beauty: Why Association Football is Rightly Called the Beautiful Game [Emily Ryall] 2. Appreciating the Not-Obviously-Beautiful Game [Adam Kadlac] 3. "England 'Till I Die": Soccer, National Identity, and Contemporary Art [Daniel Haxall] 4. The Messianic Manager in Novels by David Peace [David Kilpatrick] Half Time: Poetics 5. The Man in the Dugout: Fictional Football Managers and the Politics of Resistance [Cyprian Piskurek] 6. The Importance of Trivial Oppositions in Football Fandom: The Narcissism of Minor Differences in Derby Games [Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte] 7. Stupidity in Football [Philip Schauss] Second Half: Rhetoric 8. "Caveman stuff": Ireland's Soccer Struggle with Identity, Style, and Success [Michael O'Hara and Connell Vaughan] 9. The Beautiful and the Grim: British Cultural Discourses of the Eastern European Game [Blanka Blagojevic] 10. "Text Sex with Becks": Football Celebrities, Popular Press, and the Spectacle of Language [Jan Chovanec] 11. Multimodal Construction of Soccer-related Humor on Twitter and Instagram [Thomas Messerli and Di Yu] 12. Multilingualism in Football Teams [Eva Lavric and Jasmin Steiner]
