About This Issue

Abstract

The fascination of sport goes beyond the pleasure of engaging oneself in athletic activity or observing the physical performances of others. Through its proximity to play and spectacle, sport resembles literary and artistic practices, and the praise of outstanding athletes constituted a well-established literary genre in classical antiquity. Beyond these interrelations between literature and sport, the representation, remembrance, perhaps even the experience of sporting events display a narrative dimension. Sporting events are embedded in stories that arouse emotions, enable identification, and shape perceptions of what occurs. This special issue of DIEGESIS is devoted to the narration of sport from a narratological perspective. The contributions assembled here demonstrate that sport is not merely the object of narratives but itself generates narrative dynamics: in competition, in media stagings, in discourses of memory, and in the active appropriation by fans and players. Sport thus appears as a field of emergent narrativity in which rules, bodies, affects, and media interact. The contributions range from literary and cultural-historical analyses to media- and game-theoretical approaches and systematic narratological modellings. What unites them is an interest in how sporting practice is translated into stories – and how these stories structure perception, meaning, and social imagination.

Anna S. Brasch’s contribution examines the gender coding of boxing in German literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The point of departure is the semantization of boxing as the “most masculine of male domains,” which is historically rooted in English discourse. Brasch first reconstructs the archive of this discourse and shows how women were for a long time marginalized or excluded both in factual history and in literature. In a second step, she analyzes literary texts of the twentieth century, especially boxing novels of the Weimar Republic, in which traditional gender norms are perpetuated, for example through bipolar character constellations and morally coded images of femininity. Finally, the focus shifts to more recent texts since the turn of the millennium that for the first time place female boxers at the center and thus mark narrative and aesthetic openings. The contribution combines discourse history, narratology, and gender theory.

Antonio J. Ferraro criticizes the widespread view that wrestling is merely spectacle or ‘fake’ and demonstrates that it encompasses highly complex processes. Ferraro distinguishes three central rhetorical domains: the narrative domain of match structures, the fictional domain of constructed ‘kayfabe’ worlds, and the performative domain of bodily actions that function simultaneously as action and carriers of meaning. His triadic critique serves to reveal how wrestling generates stories, steers expectations, and produces emotional effects. At the same time, the contribution shows that wrestling challenges established narratological categories, for instance through the simultaneity of staging and physical reality and through the active role of the audience. Wrestling thus appears as a borderline case between sport, theater, and narration. The article shows that narrative theory must not only be applied but productively expanded.

Matthias Grüne and Antonius Weixler analyze the literary processing of the 2006 Football World Cup in three recent German coming-of-age novels. The point of departure is the dominant memory narrative of the ‘Summer Fairy Tale,’ which codes the World Cup summer as a collective festival and national experience. Grüne and Weixler show that the novels do not simply reproduce this narrative but vary, disrupt, or relativize it according to their own narrative logic. The analysis examines perspective construction, proximity and distance to the major sporting event, and the integration of the World Cup into adolescent identity formation. It becomes clear that literature can function as a “counter-story” that undermines habitualized media narrative patterns and offers alternative frameworks of meaning. The authors' submission thus makes an important contribution to the question of how literary narration engages with overdetermined sports narratives.

Matías Martínez describes Diego Armando Maradona as a paradigmatic example of a popular sports hero. Sports heroes, the thesis argues, exhibit a secondary heroic structure in that they fluidly combine features of different heroic types. Using the case of Maradona, it is shown how triumphator, martyr, godlike hero, national hero, tragic hero, and antihero overlap. This patchwork structure emerges from an interplay of sporting achievements, biographical narrative patterns, and media circulation. Maradona thus appears as a product of participatory popular culture whose myth is constantly retold and rewritten.

Steven Willemsen conceptualizes road cycling, especially the Tour de France, as a “narrative engine.” The point of departure is the distinction between ludic structure and narrative reception: while cycling is determined by rules and competition, spectators understand it primarily through narrative. The contribution shows historically how cycling and mass media developed together and identifies ludic features – such as intransparency, spatial extension, and temporal structure – that favor narrativization. Drawing on insights from cognitive narratology, Willemsen argues that stories are not given in advance but emerge from the interplay of sporting events, media mediation, and interpretive activity. Cycling thus becomes readable as an example of narrative meaning-making beyond classical text forms.

The contribution by Esko Suoranta investigates emergent narrativity in sports video games using the “Be a Pro” mode of NHL 20 as an example. At the center is the discrepancy between the victory narrative intended by game design and actual player experiences, which may be marked by failure, frustration, and affect. Through an autoethnographic case study, the author shows how players construct their own stories from the course of play through affective-interpretive agency. Precisely the failure of the intended success logic opens up a surprisingly realistic narrative of sporting effort and resistance. Theoretically, this contribution combines game studies, cognitive narratology, and affect theory and introduces the concept of the “affective niche.” Sports games thus appear as co-productions of design and player interpretation in which narrativity emerges.

In the My Narratology section, John Pier outlines narratology as an open field of research that asks not so much for a universal grammar of narrative than for the conditions under which narratives emerge, function, and reach their limits. Starting from the classical narratology of Gérard Genette, Pier traces the development toward postclassical, transmedial, and transdisciplinary approaches that examine narrative phenomena far beyond the literary text. He places central emphasis on a semiotic framing of narratology, particularly with reference to Peirce, Eco, Sternberg, Mukařovský, and Lotman. Pier understands narratives as dynamic, unstable processes unfolding between order and contingency and always interacting with cultural, media, and social environments. He warns both against an unreflective pan-narrativism and against a purely instrumental use of “storytelling.” For Pier, narratology has a future where it critically reflects on its own concepts and asks not what narratives are, but when they are.

Finally, Silvio Bär reviews Jonas Grethlein's narratological examination of ancient narrative forms, Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory. Towards a Critical Dialogue, as a “dialogue with pitfalls.”

The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that sport is a fascinating object of narrative meaning production. Whether in the boxing ring, on the football pitch, in cycling, in wrestling, or in digital play, sport proves to be a field of emergent stories in which rules, bodies, media, and affects intertwine. To narrate sport means not only to retrospectively confer meaning on events but also to make visible narrative processes that structure the event itself. In this sense, the issue sees itself as an invitation to further develop narratology where narration comes into motion – under conditions of uncertainty, competition, performance, and risk.

Enjoy reading.