Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (TRN) What Is Sport?

Annotation

A little-known gem, the text of Barthes' "What is Sport?" was never reprinted in the Seuil editions of his "Complete Works" - neither the three-volume version nor the later five-volume edition. It is published here in a graceful and faithful English translation by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Howard. Originally commissioned by the CBC as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin, "What Is Sport?" was written three years after the publication of Barthes' "Mythologies" (1957) and bears considerable resemblance to that earlier work. Some of Barthes' best writing seems to have been inspired by popular culture. Blurring the distinction between high and low, the great French literary theorist asks "What is sport?" In investigating the phenomenon, Barthes considers five different national sports: bullfighting (Spain), car racing (America), cycling (France), hockey (Canada), and soccer (England). For Barthes, sport is spectacle and serves the primary social function that theatre once did in antiquity, collecting a city or nation within a shared experience. The real pleasure of this book, however, lies less in its generalities than in its fleeting, strangely haunting moments of insight.