Abstract

This work is a hermeneutic of sport as if it were poetry. The inspiration for the dissertation is to be found in a reading of the myth of the tower of Babel. It is an extended and multi-pieced argument exploring an analogy between the truly strong sport performer and the strong poet. It pays attention to the strong sport performer, like the strong poet, as a maker of novel meaning. The mode of approach is a semiotic one: sport and poetry are brought together under the umbrella of semiotic through the resources of ordinary language supplemented by three specialised kinds of language - sport as a language, mythology as a language, and poetry as a language. This work, as a hermeneutic of sport as poetry, grapples with the question of how to understand and interpret the cultural and social capital of sport.