Deathly Hallows Lectures

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‘Anne of Green Gables’ and Harry Potter

January 18, 2010 in Deathly Hallows Lectures, Traditional Symbolism | 6 comments

Where have I been over the holidays? Mostly on Prince Edward Island with Anne of Green Gables. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled Bella Swan’s Bookshelf (creative, I know) about the literary influences playing on the Twilight series and that requires a lot of reading time with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s green and grey-eyed red-head.

We’ve discussed the possible influence of Anne on the Hogwarts Saga before (see Anne Shirley vs. Harry Potter from the archives of the Anne Lexicon site and my response here if you missed that). I want to re-visit the topic for three reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

Reviews of ‘Harry Potter’s Bookshelf’

July 16, 2009 in Deathly Hallows Lectures | 9 comments

Harry Potter’s Bookshelf has been out for a week now and there are 8 reviews up on its Amazon.com page. They are all five star recommendations and all are very generous in their praise. Here are four, just in case you’re still on the fence about buying a copy: Read the rest of this entry »

Chamber of Secrets: Harry’s Eye-dentity

June 18, 2009 in Deathly Hallows Lectures | 14 comments

Today at lunch I was talking with my family about the talks I’ll be giving at Summer School in Forks: A Twilight Symposium (Register today, if you haven’t already!). The first one will be Bella Swan at Hogwarts: The Important Influence of the Potter Novels and Potter Mania on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. I’ll be discussing the similarities and differences in how Mrs. Meyer and Rowling use story voice to win reader buy-in and identification, apply Gothic touches for a ‘fallen world’ backdrop, build a school setting, blend genres, foster a ’shipping controversy, push the pervasive message that choice is the life-defining value, and develop a theme of hidden magic in which supernatural reality is just out of sight.

At lunch, though, what I talked about was eyeballs, because both these authors hang much of their meaning on their use of eyeballs in an exploration of ‘vision.’ [If you want to read about this as it applies to the meaning of Harry Potter, see chapter 5 of my The Deathly Hallows Lectures, 'The Seeing Eye.'] My children have heard the Deathly Hallows eyeball lecture enough times that they can verbally reel off the five eyeballs in the series finale without straining and they were curious to hear about the Twilight eyes. I made an aside to my eight year old, Zossima, about Harry being a story symbol for spiritual vision, hence his ability to see but not be seen under the Invisibility Cloak. The Z-Man responded, “Just like in the Flying Car in Chamber of Secrets.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Divine Mirror in Pilgrim’s Progress

January 29, 2009 in C. S. Lewis, Deathly Hallows Lectures, Jonathan Swift, Traditional Symbolism | 2 comments

Mirrors are a big part of fantasy literature in the English tradition. It starts in a big way with the Alice classics by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), an Oxford Platonist, Anglican clergyman, and mathematician, when he sends his heroine Through the Looking Glass and it echos through Goudge’s work (as we saw yesterday), Tolkien’s Mirror of Galadriel and Frodo’s Light which is essentially a phial of water taken from the pool-mirror, up to the Godfather mirror fragment that plays such a large part in Deathly Hallows.

The tradition of mirrors in fantasy fiction and its origin in the natural theology and logos epistemology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed at length in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, chapter 5, ‘The Seeing Eye,’ so I won’t beat that to death again here. What I want to share today is what I think may be the first and what is certainly the most important pre-Coleridge use of a mirror that reflects the ‘I’ that is, as Lewis says, “a sacred name.” Read the rest of this entry »

Blurbs and Reviews: On Auctorial Authority

December 18, 2008 in Deathly Hallows Lectures, Hog Pro Notes | 14 comments

Tyndale sent me a link this morning to a thoughtful and flattering online review of How Harry Cast His Spell that I recommend to you. The story of the woman’s experience with a Harry Hater and how both she and the woman came to fresh experiences of the novels after looking at them in a different light is a good one.

I’m curious, too, of what you think of this paragraph in the review: Read the rest of this entry »

Two ‘Deathly Hallows Lectures’ Reviews

November 12, 2008 in Deathly Hallows Lectures | 5 comments

One in the US, another in the UK. I hope, if you are a Deathly Hallows Lectures reader, that you, too, will write and post your thoughts at the book’s Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com pages. Read the rest of this entry »

“Are the Harry Potter Novels Great Books?”

October 20, 2008 in Deathly Hallows Lectures | 23 comments

In a Scriptorium ‘Middlebrow’ podCast free-for-all, Profs Paul Spears and John Mark Reynolds of Biola University (THI) argue with the Hogwarts Professor about the virtues and the failings of Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. There aren’t many slow spots in this exchange and no filler. Lively exchange of blows, all Marquess of Queensbury, of course.

Please score this two-on-one pugilist contest on the subject of Harry’s worthiness to be considered “great” on your fight cards at home. Be sure to notice the shout out to the All Pros at the start and my mentioning “Felicity and others” who corrected me about the Fidelius Charm.

I look forward to reading your scoring of the bout, and, yes, win, lose, or draw, I want a rematch. Read the rest of this entry »

Mail Bag: GB Shaw Hat Tip in ‘Deathly Hallows’?

October 20, 2008 in Deathly Hallows Lectures | 2 comments

It’s ‘answer the mail’ time here at Hogwarts Professor! Today, there is a letter with a question about a possible tip-of-the-hat in story to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the theory that Harry is a ‘mythic hero’ a la Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and some reviews of my books now online. Read the rest of this entry »

The Aeschylus Epigraph in ‘Deathly Hallows’

October 20, 2008 in Deathly Hallows Discussion Points, Deathly Hallows Lectures | 10 comments

After last week’s epic post (’epic’ in length rather than in value of subject matter, I have to think, because few readers were moved to respond!) on the William Penn epigraph, I promised myself I would tackle the Aeschylus piece from The Libation Bearers that precedes it. This will be relatively brief (!) but, I hope, thought provoking. Greek drama is a little more along my lines of thought and study than late seventeenth century aphorism and epigram collections, if not by much. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Deathly Hallows’ and Penn’s ‘Fruits of Solitude’

October 13, 2008 in C. S. Lewis, Deathly Hallows Lectures | 16 comments

I hope you have been following the discussion in the separate post below of what constitutes Harry Potter canon. The topic is of no little importance to the work we do here at Hogwarts Professor, of course, but that thread is also an excellent example of what internet exchanges can lead to but rarely do. I think we have come to a point, after no little give and take, that we accept there are four ways to understand literary canon with respect to the Potter novels, four ways that overlap to one degree or another but which differ enough to be understood independently. That discussion is certainly not over and I encourage you to jump in on that thread if you disagree or have a quintessential position that will square the circle and resolve all the contrary thinking there.

Here I want to apply what understanding we have reached and make an explicitly “textus primus” argument for the fullest understanding of the William Penn epigraph that is part of Ms. Rowling’s opening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Read the rest of this entry »

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