This paper will explore the role the Brooklyn Dodgers (the one captained by Pee Wee Reese from 1947-1957) have played in literary fiction over the past sixty years, a role which idealizes the team’s impact on baseball and informs a distinct nostalgia for life in that urban community in the mid-twentieth century. This exploration will consider how this nostalgia for Brooklyn and its team runs counter to the pastoral myths commonly associated with our national pastime.
The correlation of the pastoral with baseball’s ideals has long been a source of tension in the ways that writers have imagined this sport. Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” describes how “we all revel in bucolic imagery on the field of dreams” that is baseball; similarly, in Imagining Baseball, David McGimpsey argues that “baseball’s pastoral, postcard settings are imbued with et in Arcadia ego nostalgia and a faith that the “real world” (the city) is eminently retreating from” (10).
This exploration will show how these diverse and evolving fictions about Brooklyn encourage or inspire our return to the city, revealing a contrasting sentiment: et in urbe ego. Indeed, this “romance” for Brooklyn is fundamentally about the passion and integrity integral to life in that city and that team; moreover, it reveals fully the tension inherent in the gritty realities of urban life juxtaposed with a yearning to exceed these realities, which can be experienced in baseball. As such, this paper will show how America’s conception of itself and its national pastime is not merely grounded in a mythic pastoral past, but re-informed and reinforced by a nostalgia for a particular urban ideal which evokes the “Courage, Confidence, Combativeness” and the “Brain (sic) and Brawn” (4-5) exhorted by Albert Spalding as intrinsic to our national pastime.
About the presenterKenneth Sammond
Ken Sammond holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and an MPA from Baruch College. Primarily a scholar in postcolonial literature and the conventions of “imagined communities,” he also has interests in exile literature from the Classical world and their influences on postmodern literature, as well as the representation of the Brooklyn Dodgers in fiction. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Language, Writing and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he teaches writing and literature. In addition, he is the Associate Director of the Honors Program there.