<div dir="ltr"><div>All, <br></div><div>Please find below and attached Dave Buchanan's review of Roxanne Curto and Rebecca Wines, eds, <i>Pour le Sport</i>.</div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Duncan</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and
Francophone Literature (Liverpool UP) 2021<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">Reviewed by Dave Buchanan, MacEwan University,
Edmonton, Alberta<i><span></span></i></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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).<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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 <i>jeu
de paume</i><span> or tennis</span>) 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.<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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 <i>5 000</i>, 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 <i>The Rider</i>. 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. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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 <i>Le Petit Nicholas</i>
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, <i>La 107e minute</i>. The only other primary text by a woman writer
discussed in the volume is the novel <i>L’Appel
des arènes</i> by Aminata Sow Fall, which features in Christopher Hogarth’s
excellent piece about Senegalese combat-sport fiction. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>