Black Sox Texts: Past and Present

• Main Authors: Kang-hun BrettChang, 張剛琿
• Other Authors: Jeff Johnson
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4m3hse

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 102 === This dissertation scrutinizes narratives of the infamous Black Sox scandal, or “the Big Fix” of the 1919 World Series, as depicted in Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out (1963), W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant (1983), Harry Stein’s Hoopla (1983), and Brendan Boyd’s Blue Ruin (1991). Eight Men Out, traditionally viewed as an authentic historical text, exemplifies subsequent revisionist historical inquiry by challenging the official Major League Baseball version of the scandal but also influences the four novels that followed. In the last chapter the focus shifts to five other fictions: Peter M. Rutkoff’s Shadow Ball (2001), Ed Dinger’s A Prince at First (2002), Kevin King’s All the Stars Came Out That Night (2005), James T. Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball (2007), and Thomas K. Perry’s Just Joe (2007), which all together attest to the American literary obsession with innocence and corruption dramatized by the scandal. In the first chapter, the focus is on the unavoidable entanglement between fact and fiction in all historical narratives, and how a singular historical event may be plotted as a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, or a satire. The second chapter covers hero-worshiping and the creation of community in the so-called “country of baseball.” By contrast, the third chapter examines the figures of villains and antiheroes. The labeling of hero and villain proves not so much a clear moral judgment as a matter of perspective. The fourth chapter confines itself to evaluation of the pastoral image of organized baseball and the pastoral as a subgenre in baseball literature. It argues that the good old days, or the Golden Days, never exist in reality, but only in imagination. The last chapter briefly reviews the renaissance of the Black Sox scandal as a literary motif in American baseball literature over the last decade. If to write for the dead constitutes either an attempt to bury them or to learn from the past, the Black Sox players cannot rest in peace, since the limitations of our knowledge and our changing interests in the past exclude any definitive representation.