Hogwarts Professor

The Potterdelphia Meet-Up Saturday was a blast — and it was especially good to catch-up with Debbie, a frequent correspondent, and Demarest, who blogs at ‘To Wander Diagon Alley’ (and knows my books and the many other commentaries on Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre better than anyone I know). I hope to get to their monthly meetings in the future for the Potter fellowship this big city group offers.

Back to our ten part series comparing the critical reception of Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts Adventures and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga! When we last spoke, I tried to detail the several surface elements in each writer’s work that critics missed even though they usually restricted their comments to the narrative line. Today I want to discuss the moral level which is, as it is almost always, very much tied to the surface features of the story. First, though, to review some earlier posts, we have to note that much of the harshest criticism about these two series has been at the moral level — and almost uniformly wrong-headed. [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this ten post series, in which I discuss genre criticism, click here. for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here, for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here, for part 4 on derivative dismissal, click here, for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here, for part 6 on using traditional tools to interpret modern best sellers, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

A friend wrote me to report that this series of posts has reached at least the eccentric periphery of the Twilight fandom blogosphere. If Twi-hard sites are anything like Harry Potter fandom weblogs, I suspect that news of HogPro’s arrival there is very much a mixed blessing. [Update: It turns out this fan site is a “spoof” or satirical fan meeting place of some kind.] Regular readers of HogwartsProfessor.com know that as a rule I do not visit fan sites or live journals because they are demeaning to author, book, and discussion participants as often as not and I am not equal to the challenge of such conversations. Some of my best friends, though, have joined the conversation here after following a link from just such sites. A hearty HogPro “Welcome,” then, to any serious Twilight readers falling into this discussion midstream! Please make yourself at home; your comments and corrections are much appreciated.

Today in the seventh post of this series, we enter the third and last part of our look at the similarities in the critical reception that the first books by Joanne Rowling and Stephenie Meyer received. The first part, posts one to four, reviewed the mistaken approaches critics have made to both the Twilight and Harry Potter series. The second part, posts five to six, discussed iconological or Platonic literary criticism and the appropriateness of using a four tiered approach in books most readers only appreciate at a surface level. In the third part, posts seven to ten, we will explore just what the critics missed at each level: the surface, moral, allegorical, and anagogical.

We’ll start, of course, at the surface. [Read more…]

For Part 1 of this post on genre criticism, click here. for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here, for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here, for part 4 on derivative dismissal, click here, for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here, or just scroll down the home page.

First, a morning Grin and Giggle for Potter fans: ever wonder what it would be like if Penguin had bought the Hogwarts Adventures series instead of Bloomsbury and issued the books as part of their Penguin Classics paperback series? Me neither, but the covers have been prepared by a very thoughtful reader and are now available for view (and perhaps for purchase as prints). Check out the Deathly Hallows cover especially. Wonderful. And, if you have $8200 lying around you’re not using, consider buying the complete Penguin Classics set at Amazon. Free Shipping for 1,082 books! (H/T to Dr. Sturgis and The Spectacle weBlog for the Potter Classics link!)

Penguin is publishing my Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures but as a Berkley imprint rather than a ‘Classic.’ I hate to think what a Penguin Classic cover would look like for the book, especially because I like the facing they came up with so much. Except for the eyeball in the mirror on the podium of The Deathly Hallows Lectures cover, this new one from Penguin/Berkley is a favorite.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. Is there any point in looking at a book through the four layered lens of traditional, iconological criticism if the author only wrote the book as a trifling entertainment rather than serious fiction? Does a writer have to consciously be writing at four levels for there to be allegorical and anagogical meaning in addition to the surface story and moral messages? [Read more…]