(2013). A Hermeneutics of Sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 140-167. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2012.761893.

Best (1978, 117) argues that sport, unlike art, does not allow for ‘the possibility of the expression of a conception of life issues, such as contemporary moral, social and political problems’. For...

This work is a hermeneutic of sport as if it were poetry. The inspiration for the dissertation is to be found in a reading of the myth of the tower of Babel. It is an extended and multi-pieced argument exploring an analogy between the truly strong sport performer and the strong poet. It pays attention to the strong sport performer, like the strong poet, as a maker of novel meaning. The mode of approach is a semiotic one: sport and poetry (...) are brought together under the umbrella of semiotic through the resources of ordinary language supplemented by three specialised kinds of language - sport as a language, mythology as a language, and poetry as a language. This work, as a hermeneutic of sport as poetry, grapples with the question of how to understand and interpret the cultural and social capital of sport. (shrink)