After-Action Report on Using The Hunger Games in English 111 and Student Guest Post
JKR 1998: Harry Potter a “Big Gothic Thing”
What fun! Let me know what you think… There is a decent near transcript posted at LeakyCauldron.
A Big Thank You again to Nick Jeffery for finding the url to this video (the old one had been taken down)!
Jane Eyre 4: Edward (Cullen) Rochester, I Presume? Twilight’s Jane Eyre Roots
Once upon a time, there was a pale, bookish girl who did well in school but was not very sociable. She went to a new location and made some new friends, but found her world completely consumed by a strange, secretive, older man who seemed to read her thoughts. One of his secrets put her in great danger. While they were apart, seemingly severed forever, the heroine was protected by a handsome man connected to her father. The young man had two sisters and was of a lower economic status than her beloved. Though he had a strong commitment to another calling, he sought a relationship with her, but her heart belonged to her one true love, whose voice she heard and whom she sought out and saved from despair and death. She rescued him with her love, and they were married, had a child, and lived a restored home.
Okay, so I left out a few details, but it doesn’t take much tinkering to show how clearly the Twilight Saga echoes Jane Eyre. Though Pride and Prejudice is generally regarded as the literary scaffolding for Twilight( as Romeo and Juliet is for New Moon, Wuthering Heights is for Eclipse, and Merchant of Venice—with a dash of Midsummer Night’s Dream—is for Breaking Dawn), it’s clear that Jane and Rochester lend as much to the story of Twilight as Elizabeth and Darcy do—and maybe more. [Read more…]
Charles Williams: ‘The Greater Trumps’
It is the week of Nativity for traditional Orthodox Christians and it promises to be a white Christmas here in upper New York State where my family and I are living. More than eighty inches of snow since 1 December… In the slow-down to the lead-up to the big day Friday (services begin tomorrow night and will go through the weekend), I’ve put aside my writing and publishing projects for some reading between shoveling shifts. I’m on something of a Charles Williams binge of late after reading David Downing’s Looking for the King in which historical novel Williams is featured. I just finished his The Greater Trumps (1932) and I thought I’d share some very brief notes here for serious Potter readers of the echoes of Williams’ supernatural thriller that we find in the Hogwarts Saga.
News from Iran: Harry Potter a Zionist Conspiracy
We’ve covered the ‘Ayatollah Condemns Harry Potter” story before (way back in 2008), but, forgive me, this kind of thing is just so bizarre that it still leaves me shaking my head. It really isn’t anything like the cockeyed “Pope Condemns Harry Potter” story cooked up by some Star Chamber Catholics at the release of Order of the Phoenix. That is almost rational and reasonable compared to a new documentary on Iran’s Irinn teevee channel. This production asserts that ‘Harry Potter is a Zionist Plot to Promote Devil Worship.’
As Perelandra, who sent me the link observed, “Just when you thought that Harry-hatred couldn’t get any worse…. It’s fascinating that [the Muslim film makers] make the same “mockingbird fallacy” as some Christian critics–condemning the work for the villain’s views.” I’d only add the obvious: Harry’s Christian critics, for all their failings in charity and in grasping the 9th Commandment, never in my experience have written or said anything as off-the-wall as this anti-Semitic vitriol. The Onion satire was more credible and less offensive than this.
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