Richard Gruneau is Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He has written widely in several fields, including social theory, cultural studies, historical sociology, and the political economy of media and popular culture. His most recent project is an edited book (with John Horne) Mega Events and Globalization: Capital, Cultures and Spectacle in a Changing World Order (Routledge: forthcoming 2015).
Authors | Richard Gruneau
Articles on Amodern by Richard Gruneau
AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
The Making of Modern English Sport
This essay examines the politics of representation in the processes whereby English sport became increasingly separated from older social logics to emerge as a distinctive cultural object and field of social practice. This involved the uses of new modes of representation in the promotion of emergent philosophical / political / moral discourses about the legitimate uses of time, space, money, competition and the body, many of which contributed after the 17th century to the imagination of England as a national and modern community. By the late nineteenth century, English middle class moral entrepreneurs were promoting a complex modernist vision of sport as an autonomous, universal and potentially civilizing form of cultural expression.