[ARETE] (no subject)

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Dave Buchanan's review of Roxanne Curto and
Rebecca Wines, eds, *Pour le Sport*.
Thanks,
Duncan

Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature
(Liverpool UP) 2021



Reviewed by Dave Buchanan, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta



This collection of 13 essays, written in English but about French-language
texts, is organized into five sections: pre-twentieth century depictions of
physical activity and games; Tour de France; running; football cultures;
and a broad catch-all “Civilization, Marginalization, and National
Identities.” The essays cover an impressive range of writers (from big
names like Montaigne and Barthes, to many lesser known ones like Dominique
Braga and Aminata Sow Fall), genres (novels, non-fiction, film, poetry),
and sports (jousting, mountaineering, tennis, boxing, running, cycling,
soccer, wrestling, rugby).



I must confess up front that when I picked up this book I knew little of
French sport literature beyond a few cycling texts, so for me one of the
pleasures of this book was learning about some fascinating French texts and
issues central to French sport.



In their helpful introduction, Iowan editors Roxanna Curto and Rebecca
Wines do a nice job of summarizing the rise of sport in French culture as
well as explaining their use of the broad term “physical culture,” in order
to allow for the inclusion of essays about works from before the
mid-nineteenth century, which is when the concept of “sport,” as we know it
today (“organized, quantified, competitive physical activities”) came into
use in French culture. Only three of the essays deal with
pre-twentieth-century sport, but these add a lot to the context of the
project (especially the ones on medieval jousting and early modern *jeu de
paume* or tennis) and I appreciated the attempt at a broad historical
scope, when a collection like this could easily just focus on sports
literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.



I’d like to mention a few highlights for me. Corry Cropper’s essay “‘Tennis
Killed Me’: Sport as Failed Ritual in the Works of Prosper Mérimée,” offers
a fascinating argument about how sports and games were portrayed as
subversive emblems of modernity in fiction from the 1830s. Rebecca Wines’s
piece on how Henri Desgrange’s writing from the early twentieth century
influenced ideas of masculinity and cycling is terrific. Thomas Bauer’s
essay on Dominique Braga’s 1924 running novel *5 000*, a first-person
narrative about a runner named Léon Monnerat (based on the real Joseph
Guillemot, who won gold in Antwerp in 1920), competing in a 5000m Olympic
final, made me want to track down a translation of the book, which sounds a
bit like Tim Krabbe’s cycling classic *The Rider*. And Luke Healey’s essay
about three texts’ treatment of soccer star Zinedine Zidane as
overdetermined globalized cultural phenomenon is compelling, even to
someone like me who has tried but can only sort of care about soccer.



As is almost always the case with a collection like this, there are a few
pieces that seem a curious fit or that could use more polish, but overall,
it’s a success.













In their introduction, Curto and Wines make a point of how their collection
promises to be different from others of its kind, “by situating itself at
the crossroads of history, sociology, gender studies, postcolonial studies,
and media studies, among other fields that have merged under the umbrella
of sports studies.” On the postcolonial-sociological side, the book gets
full marks; several of the essays engage with the work of social theorists
like Loïc Wacquant and treat texts by French and Francophone writers of
African descent, such as N. G. M. Faye, Thomté Ryam, Rachid Djaïdani, and
Mabrouck Rachedi.



But on the gender side, I was a little disappointed to see that almost all
the primary texts discussed by the essayists were written by men. Although
Cynthia Laborde talks about gender in her essay on the *Le Petit Nicholas*
book series from the 1960s and a couple of female critics (Simone de
Beauvoir, for instance) do get mentioned by various contributors, the first
major discussion of a primary text by a woman writer is on page 231, when
Luke Healey talks about Anne Delbée’s novella about Zinedine Zidane, *La
107e minute*. The only other primary text by a woman writer discussed in
the volume is the novel *L’Appel des arènes* by Aminata Sow Fall, which
features in Christopher Hogarth’s excellent piece about Senegalese
combat-sport fiction.



As someone who’s been in the editor position myself, putting together a
collection of essays, I know it’s tricky to find the right balance of so
many different factors at once: genres, periods, subjects, approaches, and
gender of both essay writers and authors of primary texts. And if French
sports literature is anything like English sport literature in this regard,
it may just be that there are far more sports texts by male writers than
female ones. (I suspect it’s a problem with sports lit everywhere.) I don’t
want to make too much of a fuss about this point. After all, the fact that
this fine collection was put together by two female scholars of sport
literature is a promising sign for the future of the field.



As the editors explain in the introduction, the title “Pour le Sport” is a
French expression meaning “merely for the pleasure of performing it, and
that no practical object is involved”--an expression they chose for their
title for the way it connects sport with literature, another pastime
sometimes seen as “purposeless,” in the best possible way. But in the best
essays here the issues and texts explored actually do both–they provide
pleasure while also achieving the “practical objects” of analysis, insight,
and provocation.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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