New Books In Communications

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “funda