Hogwarts Professor

Hey, folks, didn’t I write a book about the literary influences shaping the Hogwarts Saga? Yes, I did. It’s titled Harry Potter’s Bookshelf and, forgive me for saying so myself, for a short, little tome with a great big subject — you try to introduce English Literature genres and authors, Chaucer to Tolkien, detective mystery to schoolboy novels, through Harry Potter in less than 60,000 words (really) — it’s not bad. Not comprehensive or even definitive, but a healthy start to the subject of Rowling’s literary influences and how to use her books to enter the worlds of books that shaped her imagination.

Imagine my surprise, though, when watching the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, DVD extras the other night when I heard Ms. Rowling say in ‘The Women of Harry Potter‘ segment that she had “met herself” in a book the first time in Jo March of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming of age story on post bellum America. I didn’t mention Alcott or Jo March once in Bookshelf, and, forgive me, I thought I’d researched her favorites pretty closely.

I was embarrassed and surprised only because I was already working on a post about Little Women and Harry Potter consequent to reading Alcott’s morality tale with my students in Oklahoma City. I was going to assert that it seemed improbable that Rowling hadn’t read the book because of the many parallels and plot point ringers. And then I get to see the woman herself say those words before I finish the argument.

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Adam Gropnik offers his thoughts on Twilight, The Lord of the Rings, and the Eragon books in ‘The Dragon’s Egg: High Fantasy for Young Adults,‘ the Critics at Large column in The New Yorker (5 Dec 2011). I recommend it for three reasons:

(1) It is the sort of writing that thinks of reading as a psychological diversion rather than a means of transcending self, which is to say, ‘psychological’ in the sense of what we usually mean by ‘spiritual.’ As such, the insights and critiques offered, however clever and well put they are (and I like Gropnik…), leave me wondering, “does this sort of criticism explain what readers find worth re-reading many times, especially in the case of Eragon?”

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