This course fulfills the Literature core requirement.
The literature of baseball takes the game as a microcosm of society, usually explicitly, sometimes implicitly. The philosophy of how our society actually works, however, varies widely from text to text. In the class we work through how it is that some (e.g. Giamatti, Kinsella) look at the game and see the contradictions of a society based on individualism and communities of difference worked out in an ideal form of what the country is; while others (e.g. Kahn, Greenberg) see it as place far from perfect but much to be loved; while others (e.g. Bouton) see it as replication of our society in a darker sense, with its clear inequities of class, race and sex; while others (e.g. Malamud) see it more darkly still, as a society that promises success but allows only failure. In exploring various views of a single society we consider the place of the subject and how it can make the same experience appear differently.