The 2oth installment of MuggleNet Academia, a pet project to raise the quality of conversation in Greater Fandom, is an Anniversary Special. We invited the guests who joined the show in its first year to return for a second look at the topics of their program and Potter Punditry in general.

It’s a fun, rollicking conversation — twelve animated, intelligent people who know Harry Potter very well, talking with one another at full clip! — but I think if there’s one take away from the event it was John Mark Reynold’s observation that the Warner Brother films, while creating a second and much more populous wave of Potter Mania before the book inspired mania had even crested, may also have sowed the seeds of Harry’s demise as a Shared Text for those born after Generation Hex.

His argument is hard to refute. Simply put, most perhaps almost all young and older people who are discovering the Hogwarts Saga today are entering the story first through the DVDs of the WB movies. If a percentage of this horde will almost certainly go on to read the books, probably on hand-held devices, they are experiencing the text series as “expanded screenplays” rather than the “real thing.” Think of the Star Wars novels that were written after the first trilogy of the Lucas films. And that experience is not  anything like the imaginative depth of the ‘Book First’ experience because it is tied to and imaginatively dependent on their ur experience, Daniel as Harry.

Prof Reynolds, the Provost of Houston Baptist University, a Great Books scholar, and a mythopoeic novelist himself, notes, too, that Harry Potter has become for middle and high school students, their older siblings’ thing. The movies do not create the identification the book experience did for the older brother or sister because, for one, the films are already stale and “dated” in terms of their special effects, film techniques, and consequent atmosphere. Not to mention the much lesser impact of a sense versus an imaginative entry into and engagement with story!

Please listen to the whole show — but let me know in the comment boxes what you think of Prof Reynolds’ ‘Potterdom Passe’ theory.

• Have the films undermined not only the author’s hope that we “might imagine better” but the legacy of the books themselves?
• Is the legacy of Harry Potter to be, as we have it in Twilight, Hunger Games, and Divergent fandoms, not only the literary magic of alchemical rings, but more obviously and lasting, the diminution of story by the inevitable degrading rush to celluloid with its pre-packaged sense experience and pre-digested meaning?
• Has Harry Potter jumped the shark because of the fading movie franchise?
• Will Catcher in the Rye outlive Harry Potter because Holden Caulfield’s creator had the courage and good sense to resist Movie Millions?

Your comments in response and your original thoughts are coveted, as always!

Nancy Reagin, History Professor at Pace University and editor of the brilliant Harry Potter and History, joins me, Keith Hawk, and student guests Elspeth Gordon-Smith and Gerardo Alverez for a rolliking conversation about all the history rolled into the Hogwarts Saga. Join us for discussion of the legendary and the true backdrops of the Statute of Secrecy, a look at the reasons why the Ministry is the Wizarding World’s chief employer, Medieval Manuscripts, IRA bombings and Death Eaters, and, yes, Voldemort and Hitler. If you love history or if you just want to learn the extra dimension the Muggle-world backdrops give our favorite books, this is a show you won’t want to miss! [Read more…]

Pepperdine University Associate Professor Carrie Birmingham is a teacher with experience in pre-schools, elementary grades, middle schools, and, yes, high schools. She is a published authority on a variety of subjects of the pedagogical variety, but, unusual for a “teacher of teachers” in Pepperdine’s Seaver College, Prof Birmingham is equally accomplished as a Potter Pundit. With articles in academic journals, college talks, and featured presentations at fandom gatherings, she is in the front row of academics discussing the Hogwarts Saga, especially the few intrigued by the school issues involved. Did I mention she has a web site on this theme? Check out ‘Harry Potter Goes to School.’

Prof Birmingham joined me. Letty Nardone of Byram Hills School District in New York, and MuggleNet’s Keith Hawk to discuss Harry Potter’s high school experience as compared to what we experience(d) in the equally unreal world. First read Jennifer Senior’s New York magazine article, Why You Never Leave High School: New Science on Its Corrosive Traumatizing Effects, the article that prompted Mrs Nardone to write us and suggest this podcast subject. If you’re an American that survived secondary education in the last fifty years or are going through that gauntlet now, I think you’ll be fascinated.

You’ll certainly be prepared for our conversation about what school does to our heads in our formative years — and how Ms Rowling plays with this social fact in her reinvention of the schoolboy novel. We discuss the Terrible Trio, but the Dark Lord, our Beloved Headmaster, the Marauders, and, of course, Severus and Lily to think again about to what degree our adolescent experiences, traumatic and identity shaping, make is who we are.

Enjoy! Below the jump, you’ll find more links to this program and to all the other MuggleNet Academia podcasts.

Washington and Lee University Associate Professor Christopher Gavaler is a novelist, short story writer and playwright by day in addition to his work in the classroom, but in his other worldly secret identity as ‘The Patron Saint of Super Heroes‘ he champions the serious reading of that lowest of genre writing, the super hero comic book.

Actually, he does that in the classroom, too, believe it or not, but I think you get my point.

Prof Gavaler joined me. Corentin Faniel of St. Andrews, and MuggleNet’s Keith Hawk to discuss his insights about the Hogwarts Saga when read as a comic book super hero piece, Read his blog post on the subject first and then listen in to a rollicking discussion of everything from Harry’s super powers and secret identity to what The Harry Potter Alliance and the Ku Klux Klan have in common (a lot more than you’d think, I’m guessing!). Voldemort and the greatest of all Super Villians? Oh, yeah. And Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism as well.

It was a real pleasure talking with Prof Gavaler about what makes stories work and how the power of Harry Potter and the best in comic book fiction relate to one another.

Enjoy!

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Lev Grossman joined the MuggleNet Academia crew to talk about his latest book, The Magician King, and the future of serious reading of the Hogwarts Saga. Here’s a synopsis of this wild and wide-ranging program:

‘Harry Potter and The Magicians with Lev Grossman’

Best selling author and noted literary critic Lev Grossman sits down with Keith, John, and students from the US and UK for a talk about the elephant still in the literary living room, the Harry Potter books of Joanne Rowling. Mr. Grossman shares his own encounter with the books (as well as a few notes from his 2005 TIME interview with the author), how his own view of what was possible in writing and what questions should be asked were affected by that reading, and how Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga has altered the expectations of readers and the ambitions of other writers. He answers questions about the remarkable literary fantasies, The Magicians and The Magician King, to include an explanation of how Lev’s magical Brakebills College resembles and differs with Hogwarts — and the idea that the magic of Lev’s world within a world is something of a parable about writers — to include a mage who seems a picture of Rowling the outlier. Lev shares his enthusiasm about Casual Vacancy and the MNetAc group discuss how Rowling’s “political fable” echoes Grossman’s cross genre artistry in its black comedy and implicit criticism of how we imagine the world. One of America’s leading novelists and top drawer literary critic talks about the books and writer that re-made our ideas of what reading was about — this is a show you don’t want to miss!

[Read more…]