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I’m going to return to the “academic elites” like Harold Bloom and drive-by mavens like Stephen King the day after tomorrow when I hope to detail the literary artistry and levels of meaning they neglect in their dismissal of the Twilight books as Harlequin romances. This morning’s echo of aspects of Pottermania in Ms. Meyer’s critical reception is less academic and aesthetic than cultural, as in ‘Culture War.’ The ever vigilant puritan arbiters of what is acceptable and edifying reading and, more to the point, what is not uplifting for young readers are on the march to link Bella and Edward’s love story with the occult as they did Harry’s Hogwarts Adventures.

This was predictable to the point of seeming inevitable. It remains, nonetheless, a sad confirmation of the pathetic state of critical thinking in our times. The academic mavens cannot get their heads around a book’s genre and popularity because of hoi polloi associations, which is to be expected from folks posturing as certified elites or ‘vigilants’ in matters of taste and literature. Much sadder to me is the inability of many thoughtful Christian readers to read a novel at any level other than its surface meaning and seeming moral message because of their social agendas.

I don’t need to review at any depth the history of ‘The Controversy’ for serious readers of Harry Potter. We all remember too well the years in which carrying Ms. Rowling’s books in public meant the strong possibility that friends and even strangers would feel obliged to ask whether we were aware the novels had an occult message and that faithful Christians avoided them. In many faith communities, it became a touchstone or litmus strip of biblical orthodoxy and orthopraxis to disparage the books as “gateways to the occult.” [Read more…]

Yogi Berra, inspired American living koan, is supposed to have said (when Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle were hitting back to back home runs repeatedly for the New York Yankees) “this is like deja vu all over again.” I’m no yogi but I confess to understanding what the home plate pundit was thinking. The dismissals of, objections to, and superficial readings of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga are remarkably reminiscent of the critical reception to Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and persistent beliefs about the Hogwarts adventures. To my surprise, quite a few serious readers of Ms. Rowling’s work are playing the part of Harold Bloom and Michael O’Brien in the update to the Potter wars of years past.

I have read and enjoyed all four and a half of the Twilght books. In that accomplishment and enjoyment I am hardly unique; when I checked several weeks ago, the four books in print held four of the top five slots at Amazon.com and on the New York Times Best Sellers list. But in asserting that the books have literary value and that their popularity is perfectly understandable (without insulting those who love the books by saying they’re morons, have no taste, or belong exclusively to the category of ‘pubescent girls’), I find myself standing alone as literate friends move to the other side of the room rolling their eyeballs and shaking their heads.

I’ve had this experience before, and, like Prof. Berra, I’m startled to be “feeling deja vu all over again.”

Ms. Meyer’s and Ms. Rowling’s debut series have two obvious things in common: they are both wildly popular and they both have been dismissed, as James Thomas said of Potter critics in academia, for being “too current, too popular, and too juvenile.” There’s little to add about how well each of these series is selling but a closer look at what turns critics and culture warriors off about Bella Swann and Harry Potter reveals an ironic twist or two. In this first in a series of posts this week, I want to look at genre and the role it plays in critical acceptance and dismissal. [Read more…]

The only literature class I took in college that wasn’t in Latin or Greek was a German literature course in English translation, a graduate seminar on ‘Mann, Kafka, and Brecht’ I signed up for as a freshman. Talk about fire hoses: I still have bad dreams about the week in which I was expected to read The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks on top of my other class work. At 17, allowing me to sign up for that class should have cost somebody in the Counseling Office their job. I impressed the teacher with a longish essay on ‘Mother Courage‘ (probably evidence of his charitable side or the low expectations he had for the child in his classroom) and escaped with an ‘A’ to conclude my formal education in better fiction.

David Bevington, Chicago’s resident Shakespeare scholar in those days, told me once at a Hitchcock Hall Sherry Hour that it was his great good fortune never to have taken a Shakespeare class as an undergraduate. Compared to Bevington, of course, my time with Virgil, Homer, and Thucydides and the corresponding absence of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton on my transcripts must mean that I was thrice blessed. I was never exposed to the aesthetic or postmodern schools of literary criticism but got a snoot full of Aristotle and Dante with a dusting of Coleridge and Ruskin. Talk about dodging the bullet.

But somedays I stumble on an item that English literature majors must recognize as a cliche and I blush for the Lake Michigan sized lacunae in my purely providential preparations to one day become a Potter pundit. Today, for example, while reading a list of “50 factoids about the 103 NBA players who have scored 50 points in One Game” (no joke), I ran across this beauty at #43 on the list: [Read more…]

I will be braving the snow tonight to give a talk at the main branch of the New York Public Library in mid-Manhattan, 455 Fifth Avenue. It’s scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. and I hope if you’re in the City tonight that you’ll drop by (for out of towners, the mid-Manhattan branch is the library across the street from the one with the postcard lions out front). The lecture is titled ‘How Harry Cast His Spell’ and I will be sharing my latest thoughts about setting and allegory as well as the five other keys that unlock the meaning and power of the Hogwarts Adventures. See you there!