I have been asked to give a TED-length talk later this month at Oklahoma City’s ‘Curiosity Fest’ so I have been watching online some of the most popular videos of this speaking genre. This is a shorter and funnier example with something of a message for Potter-philes about the power of mystery in story-telling. Plus you get to learn how a director gets around the problem of shooting scenes involving a gun forced inside Tom Cruise’s nose. Enjoy!
JKR Lumos Interview with Whoopi
October 4, 2018 by 1 Comment
It’s all about Lumos and Volant charities for Rowling. She said on the ‘Today’ show last week that she realized in 2000 that she would never again write a book or series as wildly popular as Harry Potter. She has told us more than once that her legacy will be the work of the charities she supports, especially the Lumos goal of ending institutionalized child care (orphanages) by 2050. Her appearances in support of Warner Brothers films all, consequently, include at least one gala about Lumos in which she speaks at length. Every actor and actress appears throughout the years between films and the months surrounding release in Lumos gear and promotions (perhaps per their contractual obligations?).
There was a long and thoughtful piece on MuggleNet this morning that argued Rowling and Harry Potter may have ‘jumped the shark’ and fan interest will drop sufficiently to kill the Hogwarts goose laying the golden eggs.
Maybe! I believe, though, that Rowling’s principal creative energies today go to her Cormoran Strike novels and that she participates in the collaborative Wizarding World film making exercises, stage productions, and theme park building just to keep the flood of magical money rolling in for Lumos and Volant, her legacy. There is nothing in the latter that compares with the artistry of the former — and the Strike novels and teevee adaptations are not going to pay the bills for closing orphanages or finding a cure for MS.
Your thoughts? Was there anything in the Lumos interview with Whoopi Goldberg, no doubt a distant relation of Tina and Queenie, that suggests otherwise? (H/T to BG and KL for the links)
Oskar Eustis: Theater and Democracy
October 3, 2018 by Leave a Comment
A long time friend of this blog sent me a link to a TED talk by Oskar Eustis called “Why Theater is Essential to Democracy.” He wrote that he thought I might find Eustis’ thoughts “useful or at least interesting.” Right he was!
It’s a short piece, only 13 minutes instead of the 18 allowed by TED, and, as you’d imagine, it celebrates live stage performance and the outreach efforts by the Public Theater in NYC, which Eustis leads as their Artistic Director. He is an unapologetic missionary for Culture. I admire him for his zeal and concern for the Great Unwashed, if at times I admit I had to grit my teeth at the condescension for the Deplorables in Flyover Country he sees as his mission field.
What I found “useful” and “interesting” in the talk was the distinction made between watching a movie and watching a live performance on stage. For years I have said in talks and written here and in my books that movies are not an imaginative experience but sensation, and, as such, they are incapable of transforming audiences in any meaningful, lasting way. All film can do is scare us or move us to a sentimental moment, not just tears and smiles, granted, but the sentiments of rage and pity as well, none of which, however, last very long.
I have found that this assertion about film, the distinction between active imaginative experience versus passive sensation, really annoys people that prefer screened images to reading books or who “just love movies” (which is to say “almost everyone”). One of the more interesting counters to my thesis I’ve heard through the years is the question, “Well, what about the stage? That’s not imaginative, either; you watch the characters rather than imagining them. Are you saying contra-Aristotle and millenia of experience that audiences at live theater are not experiencing catharsis?”
No, I’m not. With Oskar Eustis, though, I am saying that the experiences of staged drama and screened images are fundamentally different — and the effect of this difference is that one is an individual’s sense experience of little effect on the person watching and the other is at least potentially transformative. We imagine, Eustis says, ourselves as the speakers in dialogue on stage, which imagining in conjunction with our being part of an audience witnessing a live event exercises our empathy, the experience to be had in fiction read in books.
Let me know what you think. Does Oskar Eustis have it right about the difference between film and stage? Does that or does it not confirm my disregard for the movie medium relative to book reading or play watching? Let me know what you think!
Alohomora: Ring Composition, Part One
September 28, 2018 by 2 Comments
I have been podcasting at MuggleNet.com since 2011, first with Keith Hawk on a show called ‘MuggleNet Academia’ and now with Katy McDaniel on ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling.’ I do it because it is a lot of fun — the conversations with guests and the show host are almost always challenging and a delight — and because a lot more people listen to those podcasts than will ever read what I write here at HogwartsProfessor. MuggleNet is truly a global platform and it is a privilege to get to speak from it about Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, and literature in general in this age which has largely been shaped imaginatively by the work of J. K. Rowling.
There are, of course, other podcasts on MuggleNet and much more popular and less ‘heady’ ones than those in which I participate. One of the most successful is ‘Alohomora.’ The team of podcasters there have recorded more than 250 episodes devoted to a chapter-by-chapter re-reading of the Hogwarts Saga; their following is sufficiently broad that they have advertisers, a paid producer, and a real presence at the website and Fandom.
Though I know all the principals on the show and have for some time, I had never been invited to join the crew for a talk about a specific chapter or topic. Until this month! Kat Miller and Company wanted to do a show on Ring Composition and I was the default subject matter expert. You can read about and listen to the show here: Ring Composition, Part One: It’s a WOW Thing
To anticipate your question, no, I don’t know if there will be a ‘Part Two’ to follow-up on this ‘Part One.’ That they do not mention anywhere in their write-up of the podcast that I was a guest speaker suggests that, if they do, I won’t be invited to participate!
Part One was a fun and firehose conversation, though, as none of the others knew the first thing about chiasmus or ring writing and its importance to Potter studies. Your boy Gilderoy obliged them with an hour long review and introduction to the subject.
Which maybe put them off? Maybe! The good news is that, if you haven’t got the time to read Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle, and want to learn a little more about story structure and Harry’s magic, this podcast will serve as an appetizer for the subject. Let me know what you think, even if you’ve read the book, of the podcast in the comment boxes below.
Is it possible I’ll ever be invited to ‘Speak Beasties,’ the MuggleNet Fantastic Beasts podcast franchise?
7 Reasons Rowling Deserves Nobel Prize (3) The ‘Literariness’ of Her Work
September 13, 2018 by Leave a Comment
[This the fourth in a series of posts in which I offer an argument in the terms of Russian Formalism for J. K. Rowling’s being awarded a Nobel Prize on the merits of her work. The first three posts in this set can be found here, here, and here.]
If there are two concepts in academic study of literature which are anywhere and everywhere recognized as ‘Russian Formalist,’ as such, they are literaturnost or ‘literariness’ and ostrananie or ‘defamiliarization.’ The ideas are conjoined, as we’ll discuss at some length in tomorrow’s installment, but I have separated them temporarily and artificially to highlight how each is reflected in Rowling’s work before seeming them in conjunction. Defamiliarization is the point of literature, in a nutshell; literariness is how writers create this effect and what those who study literature are studying. Literaturnost is a principal means to any author’s syuzhet or poeima.
Roman Jakobson, the most well known Russian Formalist besides Shklovosky, wrote in Modern Russian Poetry (1921) that “the object of literary science is not literature, but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work.” Chris Baldick explains:
The Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts – especially poems – foreground their own language, in meter, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts. (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, p 123)
The obviously poetic or extra-mundane quality of literary language “foregrounds” it. M. H. Abrams defines ‘foregrounding’ as “bring[ing] something into prominence, to make it dominant in perception.”
The literariness of a work, as Jan Mukarovsky, a member of the Prague Circle, described it in the 1920s, consists “in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance,” that is the foregrounding of the act of expression, the act of speech itself.”… The primary aim of literature in thus foregrounding its linguistic medium, as Viktor Shklovsky put it in an influential formulation is to estrange or defamiliarize; that is, by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature “makes strange” the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity for fresh sensation. [A Glossary of Literary Terms, pp 107-108 (highlighting in original)]
This “focus on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values” (Abrams, 107), as we have discussed, is why the Formalists were labelled as such by their critical opponents. To risk repeating myself to clarify this point, the aim of fine writing is a reawakening of any reader’s thinking and understanding by a defamiliarizing experience; the means to this goal and the object of literary study is any work’s literariness or foregrounded linguistic, structural, and referential markers that make it undeniable that we are reading something extraordinarily other than commonplace experience and language. References to other work or intertextuality is a hallmark of such foregrounding or markers that we have entered the world-apart of intentional writing.
If there is only one hurdle for Rowling to clear to become Nobel worthy in the eyes of the cognoscenti and academic gatekeepers of literary canon, it is literariness. For at least a century, literariness to these stewards has meant writing plotless novels of self-reflection about the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence in elevated, relatively inaccessible language for an increasingly limited audience of existential-atheists. The only thing Rowling has published to date, perhaps published to please just this audience, that is not wonderfully accessible, popular, and plot-driven has been the Hardy-esque Casual Vacancy, the only novel or screenplay she has written that disappointed her global audience.
But literariness understood as the Formalists did rather than as the certified literary establishment now does is an undeniable quality of Rowling’s work, Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts to Cormoran Strike. Here are three points about Rowling’s novels and screenplays in which she foregrounds by language, artifice, and referencing the literariness of her writing that continually remind her readers they’re not in Kansas anymore.
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