Athletic Addictions Under Neoliberalism: Memoirs, Documentaries and the Energetic Excesses of Contemporary Sports Stars

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My doctoral research examines how narratives of athletic addiction demonstrate neoliberalism's intertwining of consumption and exhaustive extraction by reading the confessional mode of sports memoirs and mythologising sports documentaries. Interrogating their fixations with damage, limitation and redemption, my thesis unearths the consumptive-extractive bind at the heart of sporting addiction narratives as well as their explanations of the impact of neoliberalism on specific sporting bodies and body types. While memoirs and confessionals hold a recognised place in literary studies, sports memoirs and related texts have not been analysed. Indeed, it is rare for sport and literature to be studied in tandem. Yet if literature helps us penetrate important cultural texts, sports and sporting stories are not only popular but also help shape the popular imaginary in ways that require the type of textual analysis literary studies prides itself on. This is the field intervention of my doctoral project. By exploring addiction narratives in sporting literature and documentaries, it puts literary and film studies in dialogue with sports studies as well as the energy and medical humanities in a nuanced and ground-breaking fashion. It also draws on but extends beyond research on neoliberal sporting governance (Gaffney 2010, Guilianotti 2015).