First, my current project is a dissertation chapter on Émile Zola, so a lot of my source material is in French, which wouldn’t be very helpful for most of you.
Second, it’s a big project, about 50 pages. That’s a lot to read, just for a sample research project.
And third, it would require a little background in film theory to read it, which isn’t fair to expect of you at this point.
Instead, I’ll present you with a paper on Harry Potter that I delivered at the Modern Language Association in December, 2007. It has the advantages of being short, 100% in English, and concerned with familiar texts. This will be a series of posts; today I’ll write about how I arrived at a research question. Future posts will discuss my abstract, observations and close reading, research, drafting, and revision.
Without further ado...
This paper, like most papers, started with some observations that yielded a research question. When I began working on the project, Harry Potter was at the height of its popularity, and the seventh book had not yet been released.
Harry Potter and the book market. The series was being hailed by parents and teachers as the savior of childhood reading. The series was also transforming the children’s book market by focusing it on fantasy. In particular, the popularity of Harry Potter precipitated the re-release of older fantasy books (books by Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and others) and the publication of a host of new ones (by Garth Nix, Cornelia Funke, Angie Sage, Eoin Colfer, and the unfortunate Christopher Paolini, to name a few).
Harry Potter and the film market.At the same time, Hollywood started making, in addition to the Harry Potter films themselves, a number of big-budget fantasy films, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and installments of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (There was even a truly execrable adaptation of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, although that film fortunately died a quiet death.)
Many of these films were noted for their use of special effects; perhaps the culmination of this phenomenon was in the recent Beowulf film adaptation, which rendered an ur-text of Tolkien’s as a (very misogynistic) technological spectacle. In addition, most of these films were marketed along with video games.
Harry Potter and the critics. In addition to a widespread cultural love for Harry Potter, a few lone, cranky voices questioned whether it deserved to be so popular. The most famous of these criticisms were made by Harold Bloom, a prominent Yale literary critic. To give you some context, Bloom has written a number of major, extremely influential works of literary criticism; he’s also known for his conservatism and, in particular, a tendency to scorn efforts to open the canon to women and ethnic minorities. In some ways, he’s a symbol of old-guard literary criticism, the kind that considers cultural gate-keeping part of the job. The articles he wrote on Harry Potter were not academic articles, but public rants in mainstream newspapers.
Bloom’s July 11, 2000 article for the Wall Street Journal (then pre-Murdoch) was amusingly titled, “Can 35 Million Book-Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.” In the article, Bloom locates Rowling’s two main influences in Tom Brown’s School-Days, a nineteenth century British boy’s school story (Bloom claims that it is “still quite readable”; he is mistaken, however) and in “the magical mirror of Tolkien.” His main criticism of the series is that it is not very “literate,” although he doesn’t really explain what he means by that.
In his 2003 Boston Globe article, Bloom continues to argue that Harry Potter represents a “dumbing down” of American readership. His main fear seems to be that popularity will be mistaken for quality, a fear contextualized in Bloom’s feeling that the academic study of literature has been polluted by the study of authors who “just can't write.” (The authors he names, purely coincidentally I am sure, are all women.)
Although I disagreed with Bloom about a lot of things (and I especially disagree with his claim that the study of literature has been “debased” by a widened scope), I did feel that he was onto something. There was, I felt, something qualitatively different between Harry Potter and a lot of the texts he names, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bloom argues that Rowling’s work, unlike Carroll’s, is not “literate,” a notion that ran directly counter to the widespread acclaim that Rowling was getting as the savior of literacy.
As a reader, I felt that this was in some way right, but the way that Bloom approached the argument seemed to me reductive. Bloom’s argument seemed to be based, above all, on his own implicitly superior literary sensibility, in contradistinction to that of the unwashed masses. He offered no rigorous explanation of what constituted “difficult,” “literate,” high-quality literature. In fact, the logic of Bloom’s argument was rather like that of Harry Potter itself – a good-against-evil model in which the forces of bad literature were threatening all that was sacred about good literature. Harry, Bloom seemed to be saying, was Voldemort.
I was not interested in establishing a good-versus-evil narrative. In my view, the popularity of Harry Potter is simply not a moral question. Instead, I decided to investigate what makes a fantasy novel “literate.” Hence my research question: How does the Harry Potter series participate in the models of literacy found in fantasy literature?
As you know, a research question generally suggests a research plan. Now, I had to narrow down my field a little bit; I wasn’t really interested in comparing Harry Potter to all fantasy works ever. In fact, I already had a subfield I was interested in. My sister Maria, who is also an English grad student, specializes in children’s literature and had identified a fantasy subgenre that she calls the “Oxford School,” due to the heavy influence of the University of Oxford as an institution. It seemed clear to me that Harry Potter was drawing on Oxford School fantasy – as Bloom put it, “the magical mirror of Tolkien.”
So my research plan was as follows: to try to understand literacy in Oxford School works, and compare it to the model of literacy that I found in Harry Potter. This meant reading several other novels in the genre and analyzing their treatment of reading.
In my next post, I’ll show you the abstract I sent to the panel organizer.
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Image sources:
http://harrypotterbooks.in/images/harry%20potter%20and%20the%20philosophers%20stone.jpg
http://www.filmposters.it/imgposter/grandi/gollum.jpg
http://www.saltpublishing.com/assets/authors/bloom_harold.jpg
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