Defining Sport Paper

Defining Sport Paper
3 pages
We began our semester with a discussion of sport as performative public discourse. Drawing on
ideas from Plato, Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chäim Perelman, we sketched
out ways in which sport functions as a form of rhetoric, a constructed public discourse in which
rules establish preferred values and behaviors and the actions of athletes become proofs or
examples of those behaviors in action. Sports build discourses of praise and blame from the
athlete’s actions, discourses that work to modify the behavior of the audience; to get the audience
to see the goals of the sport as having moral purpose, to identify with the praised actions of the
athletes and embrace them, ultimately, to act in manners consistent with the values praised in
athletic performance.
Your first paper is a think piece. You are to examine your favorite sport as performative public
discourse. You are to identify one well-known rule from that sport. You are then to offer at
least one illustration of a story from the last two years (2020-2022) in which an athlete succeeded
or failed to fulfill this rule and was praised or blamed for doing so. You are to find at least one
report on popular media that covered the story (this could be newspaper, magazine, popular
blogs or podcasts). You are to show how the story used the athlete’s actions as a proof or
example demonstrating something praiseworthy or blameworthy. You are then to draw
conclusions from the story regarding what readers are supposed to see as right/wrong and the
values they are motivated to embrace (e.g. a story in which it is praiseworthy to “win at all costs”
would represent a much different value scheme from a story in which it was praiseworthy to
“lose by playing the game fairly and not cheating”).
Papers must be three pages in length and have a minimum of three cited references. Papers will
be graded on clarity of argument, application of class theory, and writing quality. Papers with
excessive errors in spelling or grammar (over fifteen) will be returned to the author for a rewrite.
Rewritten papers will lose a letter grade and the authors will receive a zero for the assignment
until the rewritten papers are handed in.