University of Melbourne Graduate Student Association
Abstract
Australian Football League fans often narrate particularly distressing final losses in tragic terms. Drawing from the field of tragedy studies, this paper examines the way such losses are experienced and told, and the suffering and possible pleasures these accounts reveal. How, I ask, do these losses engender so much pain? And why do fans continually return to their memories of these defeats, when each return reawakens the grief? These questions lead me to consider the relationship of tragedy to trauma, and the contentious nature and meaning of catharsis, a term common to the analysis of both tragedy and sport
