Well, as I used that very article to question Dan about his reading habits, and as I really liked the article as a healthy antidote to the insipid Pottermania that unfortunately has spilled over into IR and academia too, I feel oddly somewhat obliged to respond to this.
There is of course, firstly, the fascinating idea to recruit Nietzsche in defence of commercialised and over-hyped piffle. I do grudgingly admire the stretch of imagination involved here. If I was to try to rival it, I'd abuse Heidegger to question whether reading Potter helps us experience a moment of authenticity, or whether it drags us down into mediocracy and the quotidienne.
The problem that the article addresses, and I share this concern, is not whether a work is popular or not. It is whether it makes us think and talk in a different, more creative fashion. Rorty comes to mind here. The point of fiction is to expand our imagination, our vocabulary, our 'Weltbild'. I read with interest that you concede that Potter does not deliver very much in this regard.
In fact, your only defence of Potter is the 'communal experience' that it induces. This of course is a bunch of rubbish, if you pardon a rude anglicism. Reading is, and is supposed to be, a lonesome, solitary, individualistic experience. Only as such can it unfold its potential. Reading is a-, perhaps anti-social. It should make it possible for us to set us apart from any 'community', rather than become a tool to makes us fit in. For the masses, to paraphrase Nietzsche, are asses.
Read any good novels lately? I'm always open to suggestions.
Snape as Roman Emperor Septimus Severus? Played Albinus, governor of Britannia off of some other guy to seize power?
Sure,I'll buy it. Like you said, we'll find out soon.
To amplify my point, here is an article from the Guardian:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/
book...n_is_the_p.html
This is the community you join: Supermarket customers. Tesco is the equivalent of... Giant, I guess...
As for the style of writing, I trust you don't really disagree that it's pretty pedestrian?
Rowling has a real talent for wordplay and for handling a large cast of characters. She's certainly fallen prey to the "#1 BS" problem of inadequate editing. But what's more interesting to me is the phenomenon itself, not debates about her literary merits. Conan Doyle isn't exactly a great prose stylist either, but his work has endured.
If I were to list my "must-read young adult fantasy authors," Rowling would not be higher than, say, Ursula K. Leguin, Philip Pullman, Lloyd Alexander, or even some of Garth Nix's best stuff. But that's besides the point, isn't it? Rowling communicates with her readers. The novels are fun. The synthesis of the boarding school genre and fantasy works well. There's enough in there to talk about, both in terms of how she succeeds and fails.
I used to think that reading was just a solitary experience, a lonesome, anti-social moment of individuation, something inherently solitary . . .
. . . and then I got over my teenage melodrama 
Seriously, though, Andreas -- how can reading be a solitary experience when language isn't a solitary possession? How can one experience a world on one's own, when worlds are constitutively public and sense-making is an intersubjective process? Why hold so firmly to Enlightenment notions of the subject and the self, instead of taking the experience for what it is worth?
Is the writing pedestrian? Yes, it is. But that's part of what makes it such a good commonplace -- it's accessible. And from that access one can build community, which is what I think the potential of the Potter phenomenon is. As I said, I don't think that the Potter novels are great literature, but that's not their point. And they don't challenge the basic conceptual map of most muggle readers, except for the gentle liberal-progressive nudges like having Hermione outdo all of the boys in all of the academic subjects, and the idea that "purebloods" should have some special status. They aren't partisan political books, in that way; this isn't Philip Pullman mounting a crusade against organized Christianity.
But what Rowling does do, and does do very effectively, is to re-tell a standard fairy tale about good and evil, and to re-tell it in a way that makes it contemporary. It's familiar, which is what makes it readable -- and that readability makes it deployable in various social contexts for various pedagogical and political purposes. Rowling has provided a global vernacular in which millions of people will be speaking for years to come. Criticizing it will not diminish its appeal, so why not instead use the opportunities that it presents?
"Rowling has provided a global vernacular in which millions of people will be speaking for years to come. Criticizing it will not diminish its appeal, so why not instead use the opportunities that it presents?"
I rest my case. Nothing original, and the appeal is purely a matter of expediency.
As for 'teenage melodrama' - you might want to think again about that. I do prefer the romantic over the common. Go ahead, speak with those millions...
P.S: I am not saying that language is private. I read my Wittgenstein, thanks very much, Prof ptj. The experience of literature, of reading, however, is.
Who here would love to sell 8,367 copies of his/her book?
I'm not 100% certain my book has topped 367 sold...
And they don't challenge the basic conceptual map of most muggle readers, except for the gentle liberal-progressive nudges like having Hermione outdo all of the boys in all of the academic subjects, and the idea that "purebloods" should have some special status.
Actually, I'd argue that refusing to challenge the basic conceptual map of most muggle readers is itself a deeply political and illiberal thing to do. Rowling doesn't just refuse to challenge, she even seems to say in parallel that troubling either muggles with wizarding things or ordinary readers with intellectual challenge is wrong. It's almost a Leo Strauss/Dick Cheney point of view, in which the ignorance and delusions of ordinary people are not to be disturbed.
Except that even the enlightened ones who know the "real" story are trapped within ignorance and delusions of their own, tricked by conspiracies within conspiracies. The muggles are said not to look or listen properly, but what tools do the protagonists of the novels use to uncover plots among wizards other than standard tools of observation, deduction, and interrogation--with a few magical charms thrown in? The witches and wizards believe themselves enlightened but are deluded through the same processes of deception that all humans fall prey to. Yet even their sorry lot is better than that of the readers, who identify with the magical yet are truly at the bottom of the food chain of lies, protected from anything that might challenge their point of view--not so that Rowling might avoid being burned at the stake, but so that she might entertain.
Rowling's skill as a crafter of plots will be remembered for a very long time. But her books are written from such a dismal view of the human condition--or at least of human epistemology--that I find them painful to read. It's as though she found the pain of knowledge and perspective so unbearable that she wrote a lullaby to ease everyone into the dream of unquestioned appearances, so that others would not suffer along with her.
Eh...
I have managed quite well thus far having read neither Potter nor Tolkien. As a teenager, I read Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, and the like.
The way you argue it, Patrick, Harry Potter is nothing more than an "intellectually more acceptable" activity than Football. None of us ever actually play it, it really doesn't require all that much investment to follow a game, it doesn't really challenge us to rethink our place in the world, the plots are compelling over a season, and we can spend the rest of the week standing around the water cooler chatting about this play and that team. If you want, you can be a casual fan, or, if you want, you can get into it, analyze it, make it a metaphor for whatever you want, write a book about how great it all is, even engage in some fantasy role-playing games. Except that in football people smash each other up and somehow 'reading Harry Potter' seems like a much 'smarter' way to spend 3 hours on a Sunday.
I'm much happier with football.
Man, what a lot of hoohah. The tortured elite intellectual vs. the low-brow crowd.
Today's trash is tomorrow's Shakespeare. Dude was pretty low-brow, but now he's canon in every English department. Of course, the sex jokes are more obscure to us now, because a lot of them rely on Elizabethan slang.
Obscurity does not prove quality, nor does popularity necessarily prove lack of quality. Ron Charles reads like a hipster poseur: he listens to bands that don't even exist yet.
she wrote a lullaby to ease everyone into the dream of unquestioned appearances
there is always something, or more commonly someone, not what they seem at first.
I think it's more likely that Snape is trying to engineer a showdown between Harry and Voldemort in which they eliminate one another
in line with what i said above about things not being how they're initially thought to be, i propose the following.
harry has always had a deep mistrust of snape. he is discovering more about him (the memory of his father through snape's eyes for example). at the height of crisis, harry experiences what appears to be the ultimate betrayal by snape. however, i think that it will turn out that snape played a much more prominent role in harry's past than he could have imagined and that snape is in fact, harry's biggest benefactor.
While I don't think Snape is likely to be a double-secret squirrel (or, at least, I hope not). I expect his character arc to be quite complex. He is, after all, an alternative Voldemort and an alternative Harry. And much of his personality seems to have been forged by his crush on Harry's mom and the torment Harry's dad inflicted upon him. I don't think he wants to be another Voldemort--he is many things, but not the kind of pure evil of Voldemort. Of course, he may want to be the "last Wizard standing" and envision a rule different than Voldemorts (whether such a thing is possible... absolute power and all that). Nor do I expect him to be Harry's secret benefactor. He obviously resents Harry--as a proxy for Harry's dad--but still recognizes that he needs to help Harry. As the reporter for Maclean's that I talked to pointed out, one of the things that is becoming clear about the books is that Snape's story--which has always been partially obscured because we see the world through Harry's eyes--is one of the major stories of the book.
I assume that, in any event, his choices will be crucial. That Snape, like Pettigrew, will decide the outcome of the struggle.
I haven't read the Potter books, but I'd like to endorse at least two things said above: reading is a private experience (obviously true, at least on one level), and there is no necessary correlation between popularity (or its lack) and quality (or its lack). Case in point: Iris Murdoch, one of the finest English-language novelists of the second half of the 20th century, whose books sold well (and probably still do). John Fowles, in his recently published diaries, has a passage in which he pours scorn on Murdoch as a writer whose novels are "easy to understand" and could find a comfortable place on suburban coffee tables. Yes and no; it depends at what level you read them. Moreover, is Fowles' 'The Magus' all that difficult to understand? Not in my recollection. Maybe not all diary entries should be published.
p.s. in fairness to Fowles, he's quoting his publisher in the passage about Murdoch.
I really want to join you in criticizing that critic. Really, the sort of reflexive anti-potterism that he proudly flaunts bothers me a bit - I wasn't in love with the series past 3, but there's no question that they are some of the best children's literature going, and a hell of a lot of fun for everyone else too.
His only good point would be The Law of Dreams which - though mentioned only in the spirit of douchebaggery - is one of the best things I ever read. It really is worth the effort.
Commenting by HaloScan.com
