Alexis Tadié

Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction

This paper argues that the football trope in literary fiction enables the writer to explore the workings of modernity. In doing so, writers define a place for the reader, which is parallel to the spectators at a football match. If football may be seen as a form central to our thinking about modernity, the decentring of the analysis brings to light different, splintered, modernities. This study concentrates on English football, as well as on the place of Irish soccer in contemporary Irish culture, or on the writings of the Hungarian novelist Péter Esterházy, who places football at the centre of his writings. This paper concentrates on heroism in football, before turning to an analysis of audiences. Finally, the paper focuses on the relationship between football and the nation in literature.

The Seductions of Modern Tennis: From Social Practice to Literary Discourse

This article investigates the cultural articulations between real and lawn tennis, starting from the invention of the game of lawn tennis in the late nineteenth century and looking at the negotiations which surrounded its birth. It analyses the seductions of the game through a focus on art and discourses around the game, in particular literary discourse. The first part analyses the ‘invention’ of the game and in particular the components of the sport as they were being defined. The second part looks at competing narratives of the invention of tennis. The third part focuses more specifically on artistic representations and literary definitions of tennis. The article concludes on the two aspects of tennis, social and competitive, and at the literature which emerges more specifically from a consideration of competitive tennis.

The Language of Quarrels

This essay proposes to analyse the mechanisms of quarrels from a theoretical perspective largely informed by linguistics, and more specifically, by pragmatics. It connects with some of Jean-Jacques Lecercles argument in the current issue, but takes the analysis in different directions. Looking at a number of examples of quarrels, this paper purports to identify the different participants and parameters in the development of a quarrel. These include speakers (authors), texts (more often than oral discourse), institutions that (might) adjudicate, an audience and rules, as well as material conditions under which disputes develop. These parameters provide a framework, rather than a rigid construction, within which speakers may change positions. Special attention is given to the beginnings of a quarrel (what counts as the start of a quarrel?) and to the ends of a quarrel (do they end, or simply cease to be of interest?). The essay concludes on the dynamic of quarrels, which precludes modellization.

Running for freedom: the politics of long-distance running in modern fiction.

This essay analyses the uses of running in contemporary fiction. It addresses the question of the literariness of running, and the ways in which literature enables us to articulate aspects of the sport such as its heroism or its relationship to the nation. It looks at a number of fictional texts, and focuses largely on two important works, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, Sillitoes celebrated novella of 1958, and Jean Echenozs novel, Running, published 50 years later. This essay examines the quality of running defined in literature, then looks at its traditional function of celebration of heroes, before closing on the freedom associated with running in such works.

Mais qui donc a gagné les élections britanniques

Apres treize annees de New Labour, la Grande-Bretagne tourne le dos aux travaillistes mais voit s’installer un gouvernement de coalition (conservateurs, liberaux democrates) dont l’avenir est incertain. Une coalition est-elle compatible avec les institutions britanniques, ou la part de l’implicite est grande, en l’absence de constitution ecrite ? Vernon Bodganor, un des meilleurs specialistes de la vie politique outre-Manche, pense, a l’encontre de nombreux analystes, que la coalition peut durer et presente meme des atouts dans le contexte de crise financiere et budgetaire.