For one thing, as you can see from the abstract's epigraphs, I had a few specific passages in mind that I was planning to analyze. These passages struck me as important, and indicative of the kind of difference I was seeing between Harry Potter and earlier "medievalist" fantasy literature. These later made their way into the paper.
The abstract also flags the kinds of research I was planning to do.
The words "media and history" in the title, as well as terms like "information age," suggest that this paper is informed by the work of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Jean Baudrillard (this last a much more recent theorist). Media theory examines how different communications media alter the way we think, act, and communicate. Harold Innis, one of McLuhan's great influences, proposed that any given media environment corresponds with a "bias" in the senses. Living in an oral culture, for example, would correspond with an aural bias; if the main way that you receive information is through the sense of hearing, then your sense of hearing will be well developed, and you'll pay a lot of attention to it.
The abstract also mentions other texts against which I plan to compare Harry Potter: works by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Diana Wynne Jones. (In the paper I also consider Susan Cooper.)
And finally, by bringing up Harold Bloom, the abstract shows that I'm taking on the problem raised by Bloom's articles, namely that Rowling's writing is not "literate." (I could have flagged it more clearly and deliberately, however.)
So the abstract announces a problem (Harold Bloom's "literacy" problem), a specific literary field against which I was going to compare the Harry Potter series (post-WWII Oxford fantasy), and a theoretical paradigm that I was going to use to investigate these novels (media theory).
Nonetheless, you can see from the first sentence of the abstract that I wasn't quite sure what I was going to write. The paper "undertakes to consider" a "relationship" -- pretty vague stuff! That's because I didn't figure out what I thought about that relationship until I was deep into writing the paper.
Here's the abstract:
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From Stone Tablet to Pensieve: Media and History in Children’s Fantasy
“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”
--C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball all mixed up.
--J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
My paper undertakes to consider the relationship between children’s fantasy, history, and media. As I will show, Harry Potter marks a departure from its fantasy forebears (what Maria Cecire calls the Oxford School of children’s literature) in its positioning vis-à-vis postindustrial information culture. For while the Oxford School constructs fantasy worlds in which the lore (OE lar, learning) of the humanities scholar—history, textual scholarship, hermeneutics—takes on life-or-death, will-the-world-survive importance, Rowling’s fantasy world—like our contemporary one—depends on information, information delivered just in time, transmissible by ordinary speech, and platform-independent. Text rarely figures prominently in the world of Harry Potter, and never as a source of knowledge, wisdom, or pleasure (except in the case of Hermione Granger, whose pleasure in reading — always nonfiction — is cast as humorous). Instead of fetishized inscriptions or codices, or even whole courses in the lore-logic of the fantasy world (for instance, the sequence of books sent to educate Polly in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock), Rowling creates a world of hypermimetic media: photographs and portraits that go ordinary images one better by moving, for instance, or the Pensieve, a recorder of memory that one actually enters and experiences. This is a world without a paper trail, instantly changeable and ahistorical. In fact, the curriculum of Hogwarts Academy reflects this ahistoricity: in the world of magical media, one learns skill sets rather than arts and sciences, and history itself is so archaic as to be dead—as is its professor, the ghost of someone who is “very old indeed.”
Yet if the Harry Potter series exists within a postindustrial informational episteme in which history is continually effaced, it also wears the medievalized skin of so many of its Oxford School antecedents — what Harold Bloom derisively calls “the magical mirror of Tolkien.” Rowling’s medievalism is largely style, but it is a defining style. In Harry Potter, medievalized stylings signify an archaic mode of playful inefficiency (imagine actually writing with quill pens) that is not opposed to, but rather inseparable from the hypermimetic magical media that characterize Harry’s world. In this sense, Harry Potter confirms the influence of the Oxford School in the breach. For the Oxford School of children’s fantasy invests in a vision of premodern humanistic knowledge, as viewed through a Victorian lens, offering the modern, print-acculturated protagonist (and the reader) access to that premodern episteme—which is why it is so often important that the fantasy protagonist be a reader. Harry Potter decidedly does not access a medieval episteme, but rather negotiates an uneasy alliance between the premodern and the postmodern, the technologically backward quill pen and the magically hypermimetic Pensieve, introducing an element of inefficient play into information culture. If Rowling fails to continue the tradition of the Oxford School, her work is perhaps its logical consequence in the information age.
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Previously:
Thinking about research projects (July 13)
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