Last warnings before I do Something Really Stupid?

[Aberforths Goat / Mike Gray]

Hi guys!

I'm not sure whether anyone even still remembers who I am - heck, I'm not
sure whether *I* still remember who I am - but I thought some of the geekier
types around here might be interested in this project. I just submitted it,
and it looks like I'll be working on it over the next couple years. (It'd be
nice to get done just after HP7 beaches.)

It's closely related to what I did at Accio last summer, btw. In fact,
having worked up a paper for Accio may make the difference between getting a
grant and being stuck in youth work for a lot longer.

* * * * *

3.2. Dissertation Project by Mike Gray: "Continuities and Ambiguities:
Negotiating Religious Narrative Identity in Contemporary Society through
Fantasy Fiction (Harry Potter, Dark Materials and Left Behind)"

Fantasy fiction is a kind of story that takes place along the border between
the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible, the
actual and the final. As such, fantasy fiction is - at least implicitly - a
religious phenomenon which deserves and stimulates theological reflection.

This dissertation will examine three such works: the Harry Potter books, by
JK Rowling, the Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman and the Left Behind
series by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. There are several reasons why this
constellation seems particularly promising. All three novels are
contemporary and highly visible bestsellers that adapt genre characteristics
- at least as associated with 1950s works by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien - to
their own ends. Moreover, their interactions with the Christian tradition
have placed each at the focal point of public debates of a specifically
religious character - the Left Behind books through their consciously
Christian-fundamentalist orientation, the Dark Materials books through their
radically critical stance toward western religion, the Harry Potter books
precisely because their readers commonly disagree about their religious
significance.

However, fantasy fiction creates a counterfactual world as the setting for a
human story, not a theological treatise. It follows that a religious reading
requires an appropriate methodology. Paul Ricoeur's concept of "narrative
identity" could be helpful here and could suggest a series of relevant
theological queries: What kind of religious identity does this narrative
create? What is the relationship between this particularly identity and its
cultural context? What competing religious alternatives draw (or are drawn
as) the backdrop to this particular sort of identity, and how does it show
its own plausibility, or even superiority to them?
 
This leads to a further set of questions about the works' readers. Umberto
Eco holds that every text creates a "model reader," who internalizes a set
of rules conducive to a coherent reading, or the sort of reading the text
wants for itself. Again, a theological approach leads to questions about the
religious characteristics of the model reader and his relationship to the
text's statements and evasions, coherences and ambivalences.

This in turn leads to questions about the dynamics of an empirical readers'
attempt to internalize the demands of all three series, becoming the model
reader of three radically different works. Does this task simply demand a
suspension of coherence or could it lead to constructive encounters? A
theological interpretation based on the idea of narrative identity should go
beyond an exercise in reducing texts to their religious contradictions;
ideally it should show something about the grounds of language, culture and
religious experience in which the works' coherences and ambivalences,
rapprochements and refusals are rooted and interwoven. Could this in fact
lead to some basic perceptions about the risks and promises inherent in
every attempt at an authentic re-imagining of the connection (religio)
between God and human being in today's world?

* * * * *

Baaaa!

Mike the once, and, well, former, Goat.