1. Friday Night Lights, eps. 1-7
Sports|Ethics|Literature
August 29, 2016

2. Good of the Order

3. Friday Night Lights (2006-2011)
Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and a Dream was initially published by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger in 1990.
Bissinger, who worked as a sports journalist in Philadelphia and occasionally contributed to Sports Illustrated, embedded himself with the Permian High football team in Odessa, Texas, in 1988, as they tried to become one of the smallest high schools in Texas to win a 5A state championship.
When he planned the book in his mind, he imagined that it would be something like Hoosiers
When he finished, however, he realized that the book was much more critical of the townspeople and the coaches than he had initially intended – however, this critical lens toward Texas high school football made the book much more popular with critics

4. Buzz Bissinger
More recently, Bissinger has been well-known for two articles at Vanity Fair, where he’s been a long-term contributor
1) An article on being a shopaholic, where he confesses that he spent more than $600,000 on clothes between
2) A July 2015 cover story in Vanity Fair, “Call Me Caitlyn”
Bissinger’s interview on writing the story here, as well

5. Quick Differences (or are they similarities?)
In the book, the coaches make some seriously troubling race-based arguments about what positions particular characters are capable of playing – the head coach, Gary Gaines, does not come across particularly well, although he does face pressure on a number of fronts, including the very real possibility that he will be fired for a disappointing season.
There’s no “Jason Street” storyline in the book – characters with college football aspirations do get injured, but the closest personality to Street is probably Brian Chavez, valedictorian of the class who ends up at Harvard
In the book, there is a great deal of focus on the “boom-and-bust” mentality of Odessa – Bissinger suggests that the rampant speculation and squalor of living in oil country has also been projected onto the successes and failures of the football team

6. Race and FNL
Smash
Voodoo
Reyes
Anyone else…?

7. Oil-Town Texas

8. Some Sample Arguments (and their consequences…)
Prompt #1 (condensed): Can Friday Night Lights offer the three qualities that Elaine Scarry believes belong historically to literature? Is FNL successful at creating:
A) an invitation to empathy
B) a model of deliberation; and
C) beauty?

9. Some Sample Arguments (and their consequences…)
Prompt #2 (condensed): What is the ethical worldview of Dillon, Texas? Who is the “moral center” of the town?

10. Some Sample Arguments (and their consequences…)
Prompt #3 (condensed): Alongside “To an Athlete Dying Young” and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” how does FNL reconcile the relationship between burning out and fading away?