HP on Sparknotes.com

[gulplum]

Acire, "who is reading the SparkNotes because she wants to know how 
they'll analyze everything" wrote:


> can the Harry Potter be categorized under the term 'literature'?

and 

> I think literature includes the literary canon, Shakespeare, 
> Emmerson, Thoreau, Poe, and pretty much 
> anyone who wrote a book and is now dead. The classics. Fiction is 
> the stuff that's been published in the last 50 years, though there 
> may be a few exception that I don't remember at the moment. That's 
> my definition, anyway.

Ahhh... You have unknowingly (?) hit the nail on the head there: "the 
literary canon". What is a "canon"? It's something which people who 
are generally acknowledged to know what they're talking about decide 
it to be. 

The members of the HPFGU family of lists have decided what the 
HP "canon" means, but by no means is that definition the one applied 
by other groups of fans. In the same way, the "canon" of litterature 
is something which a bunch of academics have decided is valuable and 
worthy of closer attention. 

Personally, I find Dickens a tedious and repetitive writer, who 
betrays with every paragraph that he was writing on a basis of being 
paid per word (well, not quite per word, but his novels were first 
published in serialised form, so the longer he could drag them out, 
the more he was paid). The British educational establishment would 
disagree with me, and Dickens is generally considered part of the 
canon of great British literature.

I am a bit baffled by your definition, which would appear to imply 
that only dead authors can be included in the canon. Of course, most 
of the canon *is* the work of dead people, but that's mainly because, 
well, their books have been around for longer than those written by 
people who are still alive. :-) As a result, they have shown 
their "staying power" and thus are considered "worthy". 

But that doesn't mean that "literature" stopped existing when the 
last great writer died. I don't know about the USA, but certainly 
here in Britain, living authors frequently crop up in reading lists 
in schools, colleges and universities. 

As with any other "canon" (in the word's widest possible meaning) 
choices are frequently arbitrary, often based on prejudice, and 
always subjective and hard to justify. However, we live in a world 
where we like order and we like to know what we're supposed to 
consider to be worthwhile, so "canons" of one thing or another (TV 
shows, films, books, art) are constantly established and we, the hoi 
polloi, are meant to accept that one thing is good while another is 
bad. 

When it comes to books, good writing usually shows. Properly 
constructed sentences and paragraphs telling a properly constructed 
story using interesting language describing rounded characters is 
usually considered worthwhile. The opposite is, well, not. 

However, few books of the latter kind usually get published 
(regrettably, the Internet means that lots of crap writing can get an 
audience anyway) so there's a huge "window" which includes pulp at 
one end and literary masterpieces at the other. What's the 
difference? Don't let anyone force you to believe one way or the 
other. The same goes for TV, plays, movies, the works. 

A big problem now, though, are "post-modern" works, which generally 
are more about the medium than any kind of interest content. There's 
some post-modern stuff which I like, and some I abhore, perhaps 
simply because I don;t "get" it. If someone else does, then fine, but 
I'm not going to say I like it just because it's trendy to do so.

Back to HP: for teenagers, it's aboslutely, definitely, literature. I 
can think of few books which could provide better material to teach 
the rules of literary analysis. The level of debate which the Potter 
books generate online among teenagers is proof that they actually 
*want* to analyse this material. They probably don't realise that 
what they're doing is literary analysis, but I feel immensely 
gratified to see them doing it.

The problem is that the literary establishment hates anything 
populist and thus it's unlikely that the Potter books could enter the 
distinguished canon any time soon. In a way, I'll be sorry when the 
Potters eventually do enter the canon, because kids will be forced to 
read the books, and their analysis will be straight-jacketed by their 
teachers rather than the free-flowing voyage of discovery it 
currently is.

I think that the Potter books will eventually enter the canon 
as "children's books", the way Narnia or LOTR are 
considered "children's books". There's no shame in adults reading 
them, but I doubt that the books will ever be part of a university 
curriculum. That's not a reflection on the level of writing, but of 
the establishment prejudices against the type of story they are. 

A couple of comments on the Sparknotes text. I don;t have time to 
read ebverything, but I've skimmed through their analysis of PoA 
(like most HP readers, my favourite). I'm disappointed in a couple of 
things. I've seen the phrase "animagi form" which doesn't make sense 
(it should be the singular, animagus, and prefereably with a capital 
A). I really don't like the following bit:

"Buckbeak's execution is reversed through a simple intrusion through 
time. [...] Every story has two sides, and in a world where time may 
change, we have to believe that both of them can be true.

Time *doesn't* change, and the execution is *not* reversed. It never 
happened in the first place! The person who wrote that text may know 
something about literary criticism, but bugger-all about 
comprehension or logic.

I really pity the young person who has to write an essay on that 
subject and based on that text, submits an incorrect analysis. If I 
were that young person's teacher, I'd give them a big ZERO for 
comprehension. I wish I had the time to write in to Sparknotes and 
tell them what idiots they've made of themselves with this.