It’s not quite Post hoc, propter hoc because it isn’t asserted that the historical event caused Ms. Rowling to write a story with hints of the event in her tale. We’re close, though, I think, in the suggestion that because she might have heard of it, might have visited this scene, and might have caught a glimpse of the tourist train that there is or almost certainly is a connection.

Anyway, a historical event in Scotland is tied to Harry’s adventures in Chamber of Secrets in this article. I’ll let you be the judge of the validity or strength of the argument. I’m left marveling at just the reach or stretch to make the connection… Probably because I have been accused of over reach a few times myself.

A quick break from the ten part series! I’ll be speaking tomorrow, Saturday, 21 February, to the Potterdelphians at 11 am; please join us at “Shops At Liberty Place, 1625 Chestnut St, Philadelphia PA 19103” (food court area at the top of the escalators) if you’re anywhere near Center City! I’ll be talking about the bag of eyeball marbles in Deathly Hallows — and the discussion with this group of very serious readers promises to be a lot of fun.

I saw the article on ‘Great Book, Bad Movie’ online and thought of the Potter film franchise. The author of this piece says that novels can be successfully translated into movies, especially “the kiddie franchises (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Narnia)’ and “the airport bangers (Da Vinci Code, the Bourne etceteras)” because of their “ready-built brand appeal” and because “good plots and an epic dimension translate well from page to screen.”

The problem comes, according to Willing Davidson, when producers try to transform “literary novels” into “mid-size movies,” which effort, s/he says, “has been an ugly disaster.” [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this post, click here. for Part 2, click here, for part 3, click here, and for part 4, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

No, I haven’t finished the edits to Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures. But I’m making good progress.

The whole point of Bookshelf is to introduce the context of English literature in which Harry Potter is written to give a better understanding of Ms. Rowling’s novels while at the same time using these books to introduce a range of English literature subjects and authors to Potter-philes who slept through their survey classes or majored in Engineering. As the Shared Text of our generation, Harry is uniquely and wonderfully qualified for this multi-didactic-tasking.

Bookshelf is organized, for example, in ten chapters that fall into four categories corresponding to the four levels of meaning acknowledged by iconological criticism (surface, moral, allegorical, and anagogical). Though it is a very short book relative to other things I’ve written and most of it is about authors and books “behind the Hogwarts Adventures,” it still serves as an introduction to what is a new way of thinking about books for most (especially, I’m afraid, if they majored in English) if only because of its layout. Today, I want to begin here, before jumping into an iconological look at what contemporary critics missed in both the Potter novels and the Twilight Saga, what I couldn’t do in Bookshelf, namely, give a longish account of why and how reading at four levels works, even when authors more than likely did not set out or resolve while editing to “write like Dante.” [Read more…]

In Harry Potter history, this month saw Ms. Rowling’s writing hands honored in Edinburgh (no reflection, I trust, on the heaviness of her prose (?) or the lack of height or majesty critics have found in her prose). And Twilight characters join the Hogwarts crew with their own set of action figures from the Tonner Doll Company. (H/T to David and Toni!)

I joked once that Pottermania was so widespread a phenomenon that Osama bin Laden probably had Hogwarts action figures under his pillow in whatever Pakistani cave he’s hiding in (not very funny, I know). Do any of you have one or more Harry Potter dolls or plans to buy the Tonner Twilight set?

Real quick note today on a break from manuscript revisions. Here’s one more green eyed character for our collection of Dante’s Beatrice, Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, and Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: Thisbe’s late love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1, line 330… [Read more…]