Astounded as I was yesterday to discover that a 2010 lecture I’d given in Orlando at a fandom conference had been filmed and posted online, I decided to see what else was ‘out there.’ Was there a bootleg collection of Potter Pundit talks on YouTube, a treasury of the first three generations of Rowling Studies?
If there is, I haven’t found it. I did find the talk above that was filmed and posted by Chestnut Hill College at their 2017 ‘Harry Potter Conference.’ I think that was my last trip there; between Covid hysterics and the take-over by Genderists and Woke scholars, I haven’t been invited to speak there in many years. Persona non grata, et cetera. The quality of the video and audio in contrast with the 2010 phone-captured piece, as with all things at Chestnut Hill’s conferences, was wonderfully professional.
The talk above about Nabokov’s influence on Rowling was, as I mention in the first minute of the twenty minute presentation, something I was asked to do at the last minute. It was a much more fun and brutally condensed version of what was perhaps the most poorly received talk I have ever given (that one at an academic conference where I was unable to work the complicated Reducto charm on the clock so my ninety minute presentation would fit into the half hour allowed).
I enjoyed watching it, I confess, because of the only memory I have from it, namely, Emily Strand tweeting to her legion of followers after this talk the short message, “Still the Dean!” That was far from the consensus among the cognoscenti present but I cannot remember ever feeling more chuffed by a compliment.
For more on VVN and JKR, the essay versions underlying this fire-hose talk, read Harry Potter and Lolita: J. K. Rowling’s ‘Relationship’ with Vladimir Nabokov (Names, Politics, Alchemy, and Parody) and Harry Potter and Lolita: Rowling’s Rings and Vladimir Nabokov’s Story Mirrors (The Alchemy of Narrative Structure).. Cheers!
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