You are free to choose any sport-related topic that interests you, but you are required to approach your research and analysis using ideas developed in the course that relate your topic to performance and/or performativity.  Thus, your thesis may be related to ideas such as:

1. aesthetics;

2. the body in performance;

3. the performance of race, class, nationhood, gender and/or sexuality in sport;

4. sport as ritual or spectacle, etc.

A Few Titles to Get Started:

From Ritual to Record: the Nature of Modern Sports / Allen Guttmann. GV706.5 .G87 2004

Play, games, contests, sports. -- From ritual to record. -- Capitalism, Protestantism, and modern sport. -- Why baseball was our national game. -- The fascination of football. -- Individualism reconsidered. -- Conclusion. -- Afterword: From ritual to record: a retrospective critique.

From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play / Victor Turner. PN1737 .T87

How is social action related to aesthetics, and anthropology to theatre? What is the meaning of such concepts as "work," "play, "liminal," and "flow"? In this highly influential book, Turner elaborates on ritual and theatre, persona and individual, role-playing and performing, taking examples from American, European, and African societies for a greater understanding of culture and its symbols.

The performance Studies Reader / Henry Bial. PN2041.A57 P49 2007

Performance studies: the broad spectrum approach / Richard Schechner -- Disciplines of the text: sites of performance / W. B. Worthen -- The liminal-norm / Jon McKenzie -- Professing performances: disciplinary genealogies / Shannon Jackson -- Performance studies / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett -- Performances: belief in the part one is playing / Erving Goffman -- Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought / Clifford Geertz -- What is performance? / Marvin Carlson -- Life the movie / Neal Gabler -- Liminality and communitas / Victor Turner -- "Performance" and other analogies / Catherine Bell -- "The blood that runs through the veins": the creation of identity and a client's experience of Cuban-American santeria dilogun divination / Michael Atwood Mason -- Saint Orlan: ritual as violent spectacle and cultural criticism / Alyda Faber -- The nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon / Johan Huizinga -- A theory of play and fantasy / Gregory Bateson -- The ambiguity of play: rhetorics of fate / Brian Sutton-Smith -- Just doing / Allan Kaprow -- How to do things with words: lecture II / J. L. Austin -- Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory / Judith Butler -- Introduction to Performativity and performance / Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick -- Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture / Johannes Fabian -- A dialogue about acting / Bertolt Brecht -- The actor's technique / Jerzy Grotowski -- A dream of passion / Lee Strasberg -- Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance / Frances Harding -- First attempts at a stylized theatre / Vsevolod Meyerhold -- The oral artist: training and preparation / Isidore Okpedwho -- The performance text / Marco de Marinis -- The deep order called turbulence: the three factors of dramaturgy / Eugenio Barba -- Performing ethnography / Victor Turner with Edie Turner -- Of mimicry and man / Homi K. Bhabha -- Culturas-in-extremis: performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre -- Guillermo Gomez-Pena -- Reverend Billy: preaching, protest and post-industrial flanerie / Jill Lane -- Performance studies: interventions and radical research / Dwight Conquergood.

Performance: a Critical Introduction / Marvin A Carlson. NX504 .C35 2007

The display of skills; Patterned behavior; Keeping up the standard; Theatre and performance art; The plan of this book.
PART I Performance and the social sciences; The performance of culture: anthropological and ethnographic approaches; Performance and anthropology; Theories of cultural performance; Liminality and play; Performing anthropology; Performance in society: sociological and psychological approaches;Social performance;Framing;Performance and agency; Perspectives on social performance; Moreno and psychodrama; Eric Berne and Talcott Parsons; Social constructionism; Erving Goffman and keying; Richard Schechner and restored behavior; Binocular vision and the actual; Performance and psychoanalysis; The performance of language: linguistic approaches; Semiotics; The poststructuralist challenge; The linguistic tradition; Speech act theory; The literary speech act; Speech act theory and semiotics;Text and performance; Performativity and citation;Performance and the social sciences: a look backward. PART II The art of performance; Performance in its historical context; Performance's new orientation; Folk and popular performance; Experimental performance; Modern mime and dance; Non-dramatic events; Performance art; The beginnings of performance art; Spectacle performance; Solo work; The turn to language; Live art, liveliness, and the media; Looking ahead. PART III Performance and contemporary theory;Performance and the postmodern; Theorists of the modern and postmodern; Postmodern dance;Strategies of postmodernism; Postmodernism, post structuralism, and theatricality; Performance as experience; After postmodernism; Performance and identity; Early feminist performance; Autobiographical performance; Male performance; Controversies of the 1990's; Performance and ethnicity; Cultural performance; Guerrilla and street performance; Social concerns in early feminist performance; The search for subjectivity; Resistant performance; Recent political performance; Post-colonial perspectives; Intercultural performance in a global context. Conclusion: what is performance? Drawing to a close; Some overviews; The spread of performance study; Coda: an apologia for theatre.