Description:
In Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, Michael L. Butterworth explores how America's beloved pastime became a stage for political and cultural performance in the wake of 9/11. Through incisive rhetorical analysis, Butterworth reveals how baseball has been used to promote myths of national unity, purity, and citizenship--often at the expense of democratic pluralism. This provocative study challenges readers to reimagine the game not as an innocent diversion, but as a powerful cultural force ripe for democratic renewal.
Review Quotes:
"This book is not for fans trying to understand the emergence of outstanding pitching in the 2010 season, or the impact of drug testing on home run production, or, indeed, any other baseball-related activity either inside or outside the lines of Major League Baseball. Butterworth (communication, Bowling Green State Univ.) is urging reconstruction of baseball as it relates to US patriotism and triumphalism and the US response to 9/11. He is an academic polemicist who prefers that baseball stay away from the symbolic rhetoric of chauvinism that he suggests marks baseball's response to this national calamity. The author devotes more space to President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq than to the expanding strike zone, and he believes that the national pastime has lost its way because of its unreflective commitment to aggressive American domestic and foreign policy during the eight years of the Bush administration. Since the subject of this provocative, well-written book is really baseball as a public ritual that supports a certain political ideology, those who are baseball fans and also wish to stake out a political or religious theory regarding baseball's relationship to the US and its values will find it worth a read.
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." --CHOICE
"This book is sure to make a splash in sports history, the sociology of sport, American studies, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age