’10 Questions’ with Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent Trilogy: Part 2 — Elizabeth Baird-Hardy’s Questions

March 5, 2013 by 2 Comments

Part 1 of our 10 Questions Interview with Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent Trilogy, the part featuring the questions of Prof Louise Freeman, can be found here. Today, Hogwarts Prof Elizabeth Baird-Hardy (pictured at right) asks Ms Roth about names, the Christian content of the series, and, yes, tattoos! Enjoy the generous and thoughtful responses!

7. Why isn’t Joshua an Abnegation name, as Marcus points this out when Christina uses it in her babbling cover story to the guards at the gate in Insurgent?

I’ve actually gotten asked this a lot, and it was really just an instinct I had– I choose names mostly based on how they feel to me, and Abnegation names tend to feel stuffy or old-fashioned (Beatrice, Tobias, Susan, Marcus). Joshua doesn’t feel stuffy to me, it feels tough, strong—maybe a Dauntless or Candor name?

I also think the way we use names in groups over time is somewhat arbitrary, and has less to do with the meanings of the names than you’d think. Why are half of my mother’s friends named “Barbara,” but there were a dozen “Katherine”s in my graduating class? Certain names are popular in certain groups and not in others and I’d be hard pressed to explain why, though I’m sure someone else has.

8. Each of the factions celebrates a characteristic (courage, meekness, wisdom, peace, truth) that is, somewhere in Scripture, seen as one Christians should seek to attain, and yet, as we see, the results are disastrous. How do you see the story of Tris as being one about our faith and the dangers the apostle Paul pointed out in I Corinthians 12? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent, Elizabeth Baird Hardy

’10 Questions’ With Veronica Roth, Author of the Divergent Trilogy: Part 1 — Louise Freeman’s Questions

March 3, 2013 by 6 Comments

HogwartsProfessor, as the name suggests, is largely a Hogwarts Saga discussion weBlog. It has grown, in the wake of Deathly Hallows’ publication and the advent of the Generation Hex publications reflecting Rowling’s influence, to include serious readings of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. Last year we began the long, slow mining of Veronica Roth’s Divergent novels, the mining John Ruskin suggested finds the richest veins.

I wrote three posts about the evident echoes of Harry, Bella, and Katniss in Ms Roth’s Tris to start us off, but it was Louise Freeman, right, a Psychology professor at Mary Baldwin College, who got to the heart of the story in her posts. Read her brilliant A Dip in the OCEAN: Divergent Factions and the Big Five Personality Factors and A Dip in the OCEAN II: Double Dipping Dauntless: Can the neurotic be brave? for the psychological story scaffolding that gives Divergent the ‘wow’ connection and resonance with readers that it does.

I met Ms Roth at Ascendio 2012 (read about that here). I seized the moment and asked her if the HogwartsProfessor staff could have a ’10 Questions’ interview with her as we have with David Downing, Gary Gregg, and T. M. Dolan (not to mention the ’10 Questions’ I write up for each MuggleNet Academia podCast). She said she’d love to. And, as good as her word, Dr Freeman, Mrs Baird-Hardy, and I sent her our questions and she responded. I’ve split the questions up into three parts, those asked by each of the HogPros involved, which I’ll post this week in sequence.

We’ll begin and end with Louise Freeman’s questions — today, her own, in Part 3, my one question will be asked in the context of Dr Freeman’s brilliant psychological exegesis of the novels. On to the interview! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent

A Zip to the Marshland: The significance of Tris’s high flying adventure.

January 3, 2013 by 3 Comments

When I compared the slide down the Chicago zip line to the swing of the Dauntless faction from stability to instability, it was an afterthought to my previous posts on personality theory. But I have recently had occasion to look through that scene in more depth and I have concluded that the significance of that outing is far greater than I realized.

Usual spoiler warnings apply. But if you haven’t read these books already, you really should! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent, Louise Freeman

If you can tear yourself away from “Casual Vacancy”…

September 27, 2012 by 3 Comments

I’d love to hear some responses to this recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  I expect our Headmaster has a different take on the Twilight series.

I will be the first to admit I wasn’t a huge fan of Twilight…  my main motivation for reading it was to appreciate John’s Spotlight book more. And unlike Harry, Hunger Games and Divergent (all of which get a mention in the Chron article as well!) I never felt a need to re-visit Bella’s tale.

But the column is well worth discussing.

Filed Under: Divergent, Hunger Games, Twilight, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: How mirror neurons are reflected in Tris.

September 10, 2012 by 5 Comments

As promised, I hope to eventually get up a few posts about the neuroscience of Divergent.  First up…  mirror neurons.

Jeanine has her faults, of course, but she and her colleagues do a pretty good job of explaining what they are in Insurgent.  First discovered in monkeys in the early 1990’s, mirror neurons are in the motor control areas that fired both when the monkey did a specific action (like reaching for a peanut) and when the monkey saw another monkey (or human reasearcher) perform the task.  The first definitive recordings of mirror neurons in humans were made in 2010. In humans, mirror neurons appear to be both more numerous and more widespread, and have been credited with making everything from imitation, to language, to empathy to civilization itself possible in our species. For a brief overview of their potential importance, I suggest this 8-minute TED talk excerpt from neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Elsewhere, Ramachandran has been quoted as saying that the discovery of mirror neurons will do for psychology what cracking the DNA code has done for biology.  A pretty tall order for a bunch of cells.

Spoilers ahead!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent, Louise Freeman Tagged With: ,