Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
America’s largest Harry Potter Meet-Up group, The Group That Shall Not Be Named (TGTSNBN), has invited me to give a talk on 14 June at the Jefferson Market Public Library, 145 Avenue of the Americas, NYC. It promises to be a blast and I hope if you are in the neighborhood that you will stop by — and if you are not, that you will fly in!
Read more about it and reserve your spot here.
Last week’s issue of Inside Higher Education features a very interesting article about the scholarly attention being paid to Twilight. There is considerable mention of Twilight and History and comments from editor Nancy Reagin and contributor Janice Liedl. It’s a well-written article, though, sadly, no mention of Spotlight and its excellent analysis of the Saga’s worth in critical studies . (Someone please post a comment to that effect. It might look weird coming from me). It’s also a much better article than this one from a local paper in which sentences I never spoke were inserted into my mouth, my name and the book’s title are wrong, and I’m called “co-author” rather than “contributor,” an important distinction.
Still, it is intriguing to notice the way Twilight scholarship is treated here. Though both these articles at least purport to be favorable in their tone, they indicate the two “safe” ways of viewing Twilight studies: [Read more…]
If there had been a Potter Mania before the Georgian Era, what might the Austen Age have been like? Here is one possibility:
Frankly, this 1998 spoof says a lot about Twilight and Harry Potter fandoms, from the requisite political correctness to the ubiquitous riding of the commercialization wave via movies and “fan events” organized by non-fans. It says a lot, but I will let someone else unpack it.
William Kilpatrick argues in Harry Potter and the Vanishing Jihad that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a roman a clef (‘novel with a key’) about the regime’s denial of radical Islam and the war the West is in, like it or not, with jihadists. As someone who has written books on the ‘keys’ to Harry Potter, none of which include Muslim bomb throwers, I rather enjoyed his take, if not for the reasons you might expect.
I find the argument delightful even if I think Ms. Rowling in Phoenix was (a) using Neville Chamberlain’s historical appeasement of the German National Socialists as her model rather than Labour Party denial of the Muslim menace to British liberties and (b) that she was writing the alchemical nigredo of the series. Mistaken as Kilpatrick or I may be, though, about Ms. Rowling having written Phoenix as a topical tract, his use of Harry Potter in ‘Vanishing Jihad’ as a shared text to make his points about Islamophilia and the de facto collaboration of our media and governments with our terrorist enemies demonstrates the Hogwarts Saga can be used to reach a near universal audience in the Public Square.
Two questions: [Read more…]
I think what most surprised me about this review of The Lonely Polygamist in Slate was that it succeeded in offering a meaningful discussion of LDS letters and the novel in question without making mention of Orson Scott Card or Stephenie Meyer.
That was a surprise — but still a disappointment. If there has been or will be a ‘Great Mormon Novel,’ it almost certainly will not be a Portnoy’s Complaint set in Salt Lake City or the Utah out-back as Polygamist seems to be. As others less charitable than I (Mark Twain, anyone?) have noted, the faith of these Saints is founded in poorly written fantasy fiction if obviously inspired and I believe their most popular and challenging writers – by which I mean Meyer and Card — create books in the same genre.
I explore the Mormon content of Twilight in the last chapters of Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. Prof. Steve Walker of Brigham Young University, whom Mrs. Meyer has said was the biggest influence on her writing except for the books she has read, said about Spotlight that — [Read more…]
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