Irving Place Editions

Home Games had its first life as my doctoral dissertation in English Language & Literature at Cornell and was originally published in a plain blue library binding by McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, in 1999. Several chapters were subsequently reprinted in compendiums of literary criticism that, I assume and hope, continue to be available in the Reference section of every public and school library in these United States. To spare students and scholars a visit to the stacks, I re-issued Home Games in a revised edition (paperback this time, as well as a new hardcover) in 2023.

 

In doing so, I realized how far back into the past the book reached. The "Forward to the Revised Edition" makes a case for its abiding usefulness:

 

Why bring the book back? It's a fair question. The simplest answer has to be, Why not? Literary essays based on careful, critical readings of primary texts are always valuable. The essays offered in Part I of Home Games retain value for contemporary readers precisely because the primary texts have receded even further into the past, and their respective allusions to specific events and professional players of a long-ago era of baseball history have largely slipped into forgetfulness. In that sense, Home Games has always been a work of literary history.

 

And later in the Forward:

 

Even for readers uninterested in baseball — I would argue, especially for such readers — these essays will always be helpful in achieving fuller comprehension of the primary texts. They preserve in a convenient form certain items of esoteric knowledge remembered now only by baseball historians. True, that knowledge is readily available in histories of baseball — but those histories do not apply that knowledge to the various texts that engage it in the service of literary art. These remarks pertain mostly to Part I, which explicates baseball allusions in canonical American fictions. The essays of Part II are helpful in integrating certain "baseball novels" with the tradition of American narrative fiction. The reprinting of "'Only Connect': The Tragicomic Romance of Roy Hobbs" in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, justifies the critical approach and affirms the value of the interpretive readings presented in Part II.

 

All by way of saying that Home Games is literary criticism, not sports writing; and that its reader need not care a damn about baseball or know anything about the game for the book to serve an educative purpose in his or her readings of the primary texts, including The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, and The Old Man and the Sea, as well as the so-called "baseball novels" discussed in Part II.

 

The Forward concludes with remarks about reading that I believe will always be true and that are, even now, inarguable:

 

My ulterior motive (now not so ulterior) in making Home Games newly available is to endorse, and demonstrate, the experience of reading. Not watching; not looking; not listening. Reading. The contemplative, unmediated, solitary experience of apprehending words on a page and comprehending their meaning is a unique exercise of cognitive attention. Videoclips might be fun but watching them is not reading; it is the opposite of reading even when interpretive analysis follows watching. In presenting these essays in a book printed on paper, without recourse to videos or photographs or any visual aid, I hope to demonstrate the value, benefits, and pure pleasure of reading from printed pages that have an organic, tactile presence. No other means of assimilating ideas can match reading for completeness and accuracy.

 

These statements are, to my mind, axiomatic, and inform everything I write.

 

-- John Lauricella