The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey

Hutchings, William

doi:10.1353/mfs.0.1323

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The chief autobiographical to autoethnographic claim that can be made is that the character of Art Machin is to some extent David Storey, and that in TSL he recounts elements of his life as a professional Rugby League player (Hutchings 1987;Pittock 1998).…”

Section: David Storey Art Machin(e): This Sporting Life As Autobiogrmentioning

confidence: 99%

This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

Geesin

Mollan

2017

Culture and Organization

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The novel This Sporting Life by David Storey is used in this article as fictive, ethnographic data to explore the relationship between sports work, industrial organization, identity, and the management of the body. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on sport, and rugby specifically, and the relationship between sport, the body, class and rationalization this paper argues that David Storey provides a vivid, if pessimistic, fictional, and semiautobiographical account of the ways in which sports, and sports work specifically, is driven by management discourses of rationality and control. We examine how this functions as class exploitation where labour is embodied and expended as a form of bodily capital. Lastly we offer a critique of the precarious social mobility that sports work promises. Through Storey's Rugby League playing fictional anti-hero-Art Machin-we explore the central struggle between social structures and individual agency.

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Section: David Storey Art Machin(e): This Sporting Life As Autobiogrmentioning

confidence: 99%

This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

Geesin

Mollan

2017

Culture and Organization

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“…5 Few would argue this is part of the appeal of playing, or even watching, sport, where 'each athlete findsuniquely, through the experience of sports an "alternative reality" into which the problems and anxieties of the everyday world no longer intrude'. 6 And yet this 'alternative reality' is not that alternative: the universalising tendency of Caillois and Huizinga has largely given way to sociological studies that insist on sport being enmeshed in socio-historical change. Marxist critiques, crystallizing in the same decade as This Sporting Life, make clear links between capitalism and the development of competitive, hierarchical games.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sport, life, This Sporting Life, and the hypertopia

Ewers

2021

Textual Practice

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Sport has classically been regarded as an 'elsewhere', a leisure activity set apart from the serious business of life. Sociological critiques of sport, however, emphasise its importance in transmitting ideology, and its responsiveness to historical change. The question, then, is how does this 'elsewhere' connect to the everyday? The article proposes that the spaces of sport generally function as a hypertopia, which involves a going beyond of the normative, rather than the Foucauldian idea of the heterotopia or utopia, which foreground difference. By analysing Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life in terms of the hypertopia, it is possible to rethink sport's connection to hegemonic social orders, and consider the way filmic representations of sport constantly engage with this sense of 'going beyond'.

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Kindler Klassiker Englische Literatur

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The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey

Cited by 6 publications

References 3 publications

This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

Sport, life, This Sporting Life, and the hypertopia

Artikel von A bis Z

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