Freudian/Lacanian Support for H/H (long)

[Ebony]

No: HPFGUIDX 7293

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Snuffles MacGoo 
<msmacgoo at o...> wrote:
> Wow Ebony. Very impressive
> 
> storm
> 

Thanks... it's not a bulletproof argument by any means, but I'm 
pleased with the rough draft (which is way too long to post).  It 
took an entire semester of wading through readings from my 
least favorite critical school to derive any meaning for Harry 
Potter.  I'm weird--my colleagues in general found Freud to be a 
walk in the park and Lacan only slightly more challenging.  
Something about Freudian psychology must be in conflict with 
my worldview (I'm a postmodernist), because it took me *weeks* 
to understand and a lot of help from my colleagues who had 
psychology backgrounds.  "No, Ebony, the mirror stage is not 
*exactly* the Lacanian Real..."  The prof was cool, too... 
answered all of my questions.  I felt pretty stupid for a time there, 
though.

The problems I see with the paper are as follows:

1)  THEORETICAL BASIS.  This is entirely the critic's (read:  my) 
fault.  I'm not firm on psychoanaltyic criticism.  At all.  I'm at home 
with Jacques Derrida (who no one else in the class understood 
at all) because of my research on AAVE (African-American 
Vernacular English), Francois Lyotard (reading *The 
Postmodern Condition* was like a religious experience for 
me--you can extrapolate a perfect argument from it about why 
Western authors should *not* be the sole yardstick by which the 
classical canon is determined), and Michel Foucault (he, Freire,  
and their disciples may form a great deal of the theoretical basis 
of much of my thesis/dissertation).  As I said, I don't have a 
Freudian/Lacanian worldview... there's something in me that just 
doesn't believe in what they're saying.  (My classmates and prof 
said that this meant I was the perfect subject for psychoanalysis, 
so repressed was I.  Whatever.)

2)  AUTHENTICATION/CREDIBILITY.  In English studies, if it's 
not in a book, it's subject to attack.  Grad faculty here are very 
liberal and VERY leery of Internet citations... they may allow you 
one or two, but expect you to know how to use a library.  And even 
some books are valued over others... the first question we ask 
when doing a review is "what are the author's credentials"?  A 
biography on Joyce by a Ph.D. in English or European history 
has more scholarly value than one written by a pediatrician.  
Similarly, if you want a book on computers and composition, you 
want it written by someone who has credentials in both IT and 
rhetoric.

Such a book on JKR does not exist.  It may not ever exist for quite 
some time... as I've said, she seems to be a very private person.  
So while others may read her work according to other 
paradigms, good psychoanalytic treatment may be impossible 
for quite some time... perhaps not even for decades.

Ebony