Yesterday we did a Hunger Games set and I thought we might spend a day in Forks as a complementary bookend to close the week. I was struck while reading the (yawn) perfunctory blowback and Fleet Street “shock!” to there being academic interest at St Andrews in the Shared Text and greatest publishing event since Gutenberg. One of the more shrill criers of ‘O, Tempora! O, Mores!’ at The Telegraph asked the rhetorical question meant as demeaning accusation, “What next, the Twilight series as A-Level Exams?’
Indeed, studying Harry Potter as a work of literature turns the literary world upside-down. If Dumbledore and Hagrid can be granted the status of Don Quixote and Hamlet, it’s alarming to contemplate what’s next. A dystopian interpretation of A Very Hungry Caterpillar? The Twilight series as an A-level text?
That was meant to point the likely, nay, inevitable end of the Slippery Slope that St Andrews was running down by sponsoring a Harry Potter conference. A-Levels are UK university entrance exams, if like me, you scratched your head at that reference; an ‘A-Level text,; consequently, is a serious work of literature, the understanding of which is the mark of a superior education and capacity.
We’ll have to assume Sarah Rainey, the Telegraph columnist, was either unaware that Oxford University now includes a question about Twilight in its entrance exam questionnaire or was being remarkably ironic (“here is the cause of our already arriving at the end of the Slippery Slope!” Because it’s there. Really.
A friend in Texas whose website deserves a visit (or two) wrote me about it:
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