What allegories in Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga have the critics missed? Let’s make this simpler. You tell me the ones they have picked up. I’ll give you the three that come immediately to mind from each of these series while you search accio-quote, your news clippings file, and Potter commentary book shelf. As I discussed in Part 5, seeing the world as materialists (as we all do, like it or not), which is to say, “seeing surface reality as reality exclusive of all other understanding,” the idea of alieniloquium, one thing speaking of another thing, is in our postmodern blind spot.

Three Harry Potter allegories: [Read more…]

The Potterdelphia Meet-Up Saturday was a blast — and it was especially good to catch-up with Debbie, a frequent correspondent, and Demarest, who blogs at ‘To Wander Diagon Alley’ (and knows my books and the many other commentaries on Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre better than anyone I know). I hope to get to their monthly meetings in the future for the Potter fellowship this big city group offers.

Back to our ten part series comparing the critical reception of Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts Adventures and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga! When we last spoke, I tried to detail the several surface elements in each writer’s work that critics missed even though they usually restricted their comments to the narrative line. Today I want to discuss the moral level which is, as it is almost always, very much tied to the surface features of the story. First, though, to review some earlier posts, we have to note that much of the harshest criticism about these two series has been at the moral level — and almost uniformly wrong-headed. [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this ten post series, in which I discuss genre criticism, click here. for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here, for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here, for part 4 on derivative dismissal, click here, for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here, for part 6 on using traditional tools to interpret modern best sellers, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

A friend wrote me to report that this series of posts has reached at least the eccentric periphery of the Twilight fandom blogosphere. If Twi-hard sites are anything like Harry Potter fandom weblogs, I suspect that news of HogPro’s arrival there is very much a mixed blessing. [Update: It turns out this fan site is a “spoof” or satirical fan meeting place of some kind.] Regular readers of HogwartsProfessor.com know that as a rule I do not visit fan sites or live journals because they are demeaning to author, book, and discussion participants as often as not and I am not equal to the challenge of such conversations. Some of my best friends, though, have joined the conversation here after following a link from just such sites. A hearty HogPro “Welcome,” then, to any serious Twilight readers falling into this discussion midstream! Please make yourself at home; your comments and corrections are much appreciated.

Today in the seventh post of this series, we enter the third and last part of our look at the similarities in the critical reception that the first books by Joanne Rowling and Stephenie Meyer received. The first part, posts one to four, reviewed the mistaken approaches critics have made to both the Twilight and Harry Potter series. The second part, posts five to six, discussed iconological or Platonic literary criticism and the appropriateness of using a four tiered approach in books most readers only appreciate at a surface level. In the third part, posts seven to ten, we will explore just what the critics missed at each level: the surface, moral, allegorical, and anagogical.

We’ll start, of course, at the surface. [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this post on genre criticism, click here. for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here, for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here, for part 4 on derivative dismissal, click here, for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

First, a morning Grin and Giggle for Potter fans: ever wonder what it would be like if Penguin had bought the Hogwarts Adventures series instead of Bloomsbury and issued the books as part of their Penguin Classics paperback series? Me neither, but the covers have been prepared by a very thoughtful reader and are now available for view (and perhaps for purchase as prints). Check out the Deathly Hallows cover especially. Wonderful. And, if you have $8200 lying around you’re not using, consider buying the complete Penguin Classics set at Amazon. Free Shipping for 1,082 books! (H/T to Dr. Sturgis and The Spectacle weBlog for the Potter Classics link!)

Penguin is publishing my Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures but as a Berkley imprint rather than a ‘Classic.’ I hate to think what a Penguin Classic cover would look like for the book, especially because I like the facing they came up with so much. Except for the eyeball in the mirror on the podium of The Deathly Hallows Lectures cover, this new one from Penguin/Berkley is a favorite.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. Is there any point in looking at a book through the four layered lens of traditional, iconological criticism if the author only wrote the book as a trifling entertainment rather than serious fiction? Does a writer have to consciously be writing at four levels for there to be allegorical and anagogical meaning in addition to the surface story and moral messages? [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this post, click here. for Part 2, click here, for part 3, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

Good news and bad news today. The bad news is that neither of my cars was up to the trip to Connecticut this morning: no Jim Dale reading Goblet, no business lunch at Zossima Press, no conversation with Prof. Tumminio and the Eli Bulldogs about Christology and Harry Potter. Major downer. The only upside, besides not driving seven hours today, is I can forge ahead with the effort here in comparing the critical reception Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts Adventures received with reviews of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.

Today is my last note about critics per se before detailing in four steps what I think they missed in both series, namely, why readers love these stories as much as they do. I’ve touched on dismissals and criticism according to core genre and to Culture War transgressions in terms of both religious touchstones and political correctness. Today let’s look at how some readers have attempted to diminish the significance of Harry and Bella by suggesting they are not originals, i.e., that the value and importance of the books about their adventures are derived from other and better sources that inspired and influenced Ms. Rowling and Ms. Meyer. [Read more…]