야구와 전쟁을 통한 1940-50년대 미국 역사와 문화 교육

Teaching through Baseball and War: 1940s and 50s American History and Culture

Whitman and Twain celebrated baseball as the quintessential symbol of America, and Jacques Barzun stated that you need to learn baseball to understand "the heart and mind of America." As one of the most representative American sports, baseball has long been canonized as an American pastime, and Americans' infatuation with the game can be easily found in American popular culture and literary texts. In the course of American Literature and Culture, I have chosen three baseball-related texts as a lens to view and interrogate American culture and history in the period spanning the Second World War and the Korean War. While the objective is to initiate the first-year students into college level reading and analysis, and the course material highlights the intersection of American culture and literature with the significant implications of baseball in America. A League of Their Own (1992) chronicles the era of the Second World War, when the women's baseball league was established to fill the absence of major league baseball players. American Pastime (2007) portrays the same era but the focuses on the Japanese American internment camp where baseball functioned as an apparatus to maintain a sense of normalcy. Finally, Keeping Score (2008) intertwines plots of female bildungsroman with the love of baseball and the war in Korea. This article will demonstrate the ways in which all these texts allow students to engage the important questions of gender, race, identity, history, and America through baseball in spite of varying perspectives and strategies.