February’s 10 Question interview with a living author of books we Hogwarts Professors think our like-minded readers will enjoy is with Gary L. Gregg, author of The Sporran and The Iona Conspiracy, the first books in The Remnant Chronicles. Though this interview took place online rather than in person, I’ve met the man and can testify that Prof Gregg is as winsome and challenging in person as his novels’ characters are engaging and memorable. Which is saying something.

On to the interview!

1. Prof. Gregg, you’re a noted political scientist, head of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, and the author of books on topics as varied as the life of George Washington, the genius of the Electoral College, and the representational nature of the Presidency. That’s all well and good — frankly, I’m fascinated — but it certainly isn’t the usual CV for a fantasy fiction author. How do you get from your public life to your fictional world — or is the latter really another, neglected aspect of the political scientist?

In many ways, my formal training as a political scientist couldn’t be further from my life as a fantasy writer.  The only connection, I think, might be my interest in political ideas and the history of political thought, the central themes of which have often been explored in novels, poetry, and the theatre.  I grew up as a non-reader, really, and have had a lot of catching up to do.  Over the years of trying to “catch up,” I have become convinced, with Napoleon, that “imagination rules the world.”  It is story that really shapes us into who we are and knowing that makes the facts and figures of political science seem not only less interesting, but much less important.  I became a fantasy writer because the genre became what I wanted to read and what I thought young people, in particular, needed to read.  I hoped to strike a few imaginations in the wider world out there and I hope I have done at least that.

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Suzanne Keen, Harvard PhD and English Department Chair at Washington and Lee University, told me on my visit there last fall that her students who have grown up reading Harry Potter are able to grasp and love longer narrative better than her students in the past. She shared this with a reporter at W&L in  the form of a “thank you” to Ms. Rowling for fostering her students’ appreciation of Dickens.

The article, which I hope very much you will read, explains how reading Harry Potter makes you a better reader of Dickens, i.e., the Hogwarts Saga’s long narrative, comedy amidst tragedy, complex plots, cryptonyms, word play, etc. I’d go further and mention Dickens’ gift for allegory or creating characters who are story transparencies for vices and virtues, the transfiguration of characters (positive and demonic), the topoi of literary alchemy, even his indoctrination of readers into a politically correct Romanticism (which might also just be called Christian charity?).

Did I mention the gothic melodrama and interior satire? I’m reading Dickens every night to my children to celebrate the gift of The Complete Works we received at Nativity. I’m loving reading Dickens through Potter-phile eyes, which is new to me, I realize, but will be the rule for Dickens readers for many decades — all those in Prof. Keen’s classes, certainly, and those on campus today.

I pressed her for some data to back up her anecdotal experience of the Potter Generations being more accomplished and sensitive readers than their older siblings and parents who didn’t, couldn’t have read Harry were. She shared two studies, both from the NEA: check them out here and here.

I have a lot more to say about Dickens, especially the Christmas novellas A Christmas Carol and the much less well known The Haunted Man. The first is a dramatic ring composition, written in fact as a song but really a round, and the second has several signs of being an alchemical set piece, not to mention a Weasley family look-alike. But more on that in the near future, time allowing.

My apologies to those of you who saw this post when it was only notes cut-and-pasted from emails. I pushed ‘publish’ instead of ‘save’ yesterday and had no idea this was live until comments started coming in. Your comments and corrections, of course, are coveted as always — especially if you can share your experience of classics post-Potter and how your vision and experience as a reader has or hasn’t been changed.

The idea that the Three Brothers in Deathly Hallows are story pointers to the Dark Lord, Severus Snape, and Harry Potter was discussed here in the weeks after the book’s publication in 2007. Alan Jacobs, however, I think was the first to publish the idea (if only as a hint) in his Christianity Today review of the series finale, ‘The Youngest Brother’s Tale.’

Many readers have already exclaimed that Harry’s final quest marks him as a clear Christ figure. This is wrong, seriously wrong, and I think J. K. Rowling goes out of her way to tell us so. People (characters in the books as well as readers) think that Harry is a unique person of unique power, but at a dozen points in the series we are clearly shown that he is not: he is called the Chosen One, but he is chosen by Voldemort, and Dumbledore emphasizes to Harry the sheer contingency of this choice. The work of the Cross is done by Christ alone; Harry always has help. (It’s worth emphasizing that while each of the Horcruxes is destroyed, each is destroyed by a different person.) At his moment of agony Christ was abandoned; at the end of his quest Harry is supported and comforted. [Read more…]

Some fictional characters get their invitation to the perfect school by owl. For you, there’s this e-mail from Kenyon College.

If your sense of humor and your sense of wonder inform everything you do, just go to owls.kenyon.edu, where you can learn more about Kenyon, one of the country’s best liberal arts colleges. (And tell us about your perfect college, if you like.)

This message sent by admissions@kenyon.edu.
Kenyon College
101 Chase Avenue
Gambier, OH 43022

You opted in to this list from: We received your name from the College Board PSAT search or from your high school per results of the NRCCUA survey.

The Huffington Post yesterday put up a fun, provocative article, Should J. K. Rowling Win the Noble Prize? I urge you to read the whole thing and share your thoughts in the comment boxes below.

Here are three thoughts off the top of my head about this article and the possibility that Ms. Rowling might be honored this way:

(1) Would they be honoring her or she them? Forgive me for stating the obvious but the bloom is long off the rose of winning a Nobel Prize, outside of the so-called ‘hard sciences.’ What prompted this HuffPro piece, for an example beyond President Obama receiving the Peace Prize or Tom Friedman winning the Economics Nobel, was the revelation that C. S. Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Literature Prize and was turned down because Tollers “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.” As the author points out, the criteria for the Literature reward from Oslo seems at least as much political correctness and artistic obscurity as literary merit. If Ms. Rowling accepted the prize, it’s value in the eyes of the great unwashed reading public would skyrocket; they would know and have read at least one writer who was a Nobel Laureate.

(2) Does the Hogwarts Saga meet the Literature Prize’s criteria? Here is where it gets to be fun. Forget the actual criteria used by judges in Norway alluded to above. Do Harry’s adventures satisfy the standards that Alfred Nobel set down so long ago?

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