This is stuff to warm the heart of every Harry Potter fan: story after vignette after anecdote of fans’ experience connecting with other fans, often strangers (can we say shared text, Professor Granger?)
It might be worth clicking the Best Of buttons to find some of the greatest. Here’s a favorite of mine:
“Today, I was walking home from school. I then saw three kids dressed as Harry, Hermione, and Ron running down the street being chased my a man who looked about 50 dressed up as Snape, who was screaming “GET BACK HERE, POTTER!”. I’m not sure what just happened, but I want in.”
Also, I actually cried laughing when I read this one. Technically, it’s a joke and not a story, but who’s complaining?
Red Rocker on 
diva_alix on 
Arabella Figg on 
Joivre on 
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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
I clicked over, only to discover you were linking to one of my daughter’s favorite sites… she reads it on her iPod almost every day, reads me the best ones… Clearly I’ve raised her right!
Fan cultures are awesome, and HP exploits them like few other fan communities do. The creativity out there among fans who do things like Potter Puppet Pals, create Quidditch clubs at schools, or make their own costumes (a long-standing tradition for cosplayers) is amazing.
The “shared text” thesis is one I go back and forth with. I tend to think the bonds and connections go far beyond just the book. In many cases, I don’t think the book itself is necessarily all that important. For us, it is a central site because so much of what we do revolves around close readings of all 7 books. But, for things like the Harry Potter Alliance, I wonder how central the text is.
We have to rethink what IS the Harry Potter “text”, perhaps.
How else would you define Harry Potter text?
I think the question really should be, what are the levels of Harry Potter fandom? The text is the text, but the way people have interacted with it are different. I mean you’ve got people who’ve only seen the movies, you’ve got people who’ve only read the books, you have tangential fans, dedicated fans, fans who are devoted to things like WROCK, filks, art, fan fiction, costumes, those who are involved in live action stuff or those who are more scholarly. And then you’ve got people who are involved in multiple levels of it.
Red, I would put it this way: If a scholar is to exhaustively and thoroughly explore HP, he can no longer legitimately focus solely on the books and ignore the other phenomena around it. I would argue the other stuff is just as important to understanding HP’s impact on culture — in some ways, even more so.
Over the last six months, while I was in PhD/teaching purgatory, I began to realize that nearly every literary theory I’ve ever known has always situated meaning in the book. Even postmodern and post-structural theories that argue all meaning has collapsed (Derrida), or that meaning is entirely on the reader/receiver end of communication (Stanley Fish) — they all stay within the boundaries of the language of the book itself. Why? A lot of literary criticism has sought to “empower the reader” over the last 40 years. Except that virtually no lit scholar has made any effort at all to pay attention to what everyday readers actually think. All the ideas about reading we’ve discussed here have come out of academia at some point — and, really, all those ideas are talking about the academician as she reads. And frankly, most academics read for reasons completely different from the everyday consumer — at least they do when they decide to write something down for other academics to look at.
I’ve come to wonder if that is really all that productive, especially now that so many popular stories have become participatory and involved widely disparate groups that would never have met or interacted otherwise. Every book or movie before HP has had a participatory bent of some kind. Before the internet, even really bad books/movies developed a loyal group of followers who met occasionally to discuss the things they love. But the internet is basically a big communications and distribution system. And HP was one of the first communities to fully exploit the potential of such a system to create, distribute, and connect different artifacts the way fans saw fit. More importantly, they could do so easily, with more people, and make their creations more easily findable. And Rowling has largely been perfectly happy to let us do it.
Okay, I do have to go be a productive student today…
Dave the Longwinded, you are aptly named. My education was in chemistry and law, and when I got to law school, I (along with others with a science or engineering background) found it easy to pass with an acceptable “C”, but difficult to get higher grades. The problem was that I couldn’t go on and on about points of law the way that liberal arts majors can do. I still have the same problem. However, I enjoy reading all the comments (longwinded or not) on this site, so keep it up!!
Charlie, yeah… It’s something I’ve had to reign in a bit as a professional writing student. Totally different set of rhetorical expectations than you usually find in a lit paper.
I have some ridiculously long and convoluted posts laying somewhere around the pub.
As for chemistry: math with numbers is bad enough. Math with letters ought to be against the law!
I was particularly struck by the dream about the cast of Harry Potter helping to save the Beatles…does this reflect some sort of hidden theme in the books, I wonder?
Thanks for the link, Jenna.
Dave — I didn’t realize you were in a PhD programme. Dangerous question, of course, but what are you studying and where?
I do have to ask whether the social effect of a text is different than the text itself? It’s part of the history of the text, naturally, but there’s a very different effect of, say, Pilgrim’s Progress today than in the seventeenth century. But the text has arguably remained unchanged. In a recent paper I wrote on MacDonald, I suggested a twofold locus of interrogation on the story, the past text that shaped MacDonald’s thinking, and the present reading of that text. So it became a triangular discussion, really–the text itself, its intersection with the historic, and is intersection with the present. I’m not sure how effective I was–I think it worked in terms of the paper itself, but I’m not staking my reputation on it as a critical theory, yet.
Proof that you are not the only representative of the House of Longwind…
Dave, I didn’t find your comment longwinded at all (nor yours, Mr Pond). You brought out an important point, one my husband made early on: the intersection of a popular series read by millions and the Internet.
Would Harry Potter have been as hugely popular without the Internet? Consider the role the Internet played in putting Potter on the world stage and linking up fans. As you say, there were other book/film fans who had participatory connection through, say, geographic fancons. But the Internet has made possible a connected, world-wide, ongoing, 24/7 fancon, inviting many forms of expression and participation.
The timing was incredibly lucky for Rowling–and us–I think.
Mr. Pond, I’m at Old Dominion University, studying in the Professional Writing and New Media track of the English department. After this semester, I’ll only have about 6 to 9 hours of coursework left before I get to dive headfirst into my exams and dissertation.
Your paper on Pilgrim’s Progress sounds like something I’d have interest in. Just out of curiosity, have you ever considered incorporating interviews with readers of the book as part of your critical project(s)? Clearly, you can’t talk to readers from the 17th century! But, I do wonder what we would learn from folks who picked it up today.
My initial interests started with exploring the implications video games have for rethinking narrative as a phenomenological issue rather than a structural one. The PW folks here were the ones most interested in participatory cultures, game interfaces, and user experiences. So, I drifted into this side of the department and have started integrating work on interaction design into my research. Ultimately, I want to do something that studies people’s affective responses to interactive systems and stories. I have a solid grasp on a theoretical framework to use, but I haven’t decided on an artifact to throw it at, yet. Too many things I want to look at!
Including the one Arabella mentioned. I think you’re absolutely dead on right about that. HP owes a big chunk of its success to the internet. It is the most effective tool to let fan communities like ours organize and work. And I don’t think for a second the books would saturate pop culture nearly as much as they do without the web. This sentence is perfect, and I REALLY wish I had written it:
That’s analytical poetry, right there.
Very kind, Dave; I well know that “I wish I’d written it” feeling. I’m flattered. And I said it to you on an Internet fan website! Does it get better than that?
Arabella, it’s very, very meta! As someone who gets a kick out of a Spaceballs reference showing up in a fan made parody of Star Wars, that makes me happy…
And very, very dorky…
Thanks, Dave, for the explanation, especially:
I would put it this way: If a scholar is to exhaustively and thoroughly explore HP, he can no longer legitimately focus solely on the books and ignore the other phenomena around it. I would argue the other stuff is just as important to understanding HP’s impact on culture — in some ways, even more so.
That makes it a bit clearer for me.
You make a distinction between exploring HP and understanding HP’s impact on culture. In order to understand the latter, I’d agree that you’d have to look at what people are thinking and writing and doing with HP, ranging from scholarly articles to movies to YouTube Lego skits to rock bands.
But if I understand you right, you’re also saying that in order to understand HP, it is not necessary to be constrained by the boundaries of the language of the book itself. Am I correct in concluding that you’re saying that the reaction of the reader adds meaning to the book?
BTW, I would argue that the reasons why academics read – as compared to why those of us who read for pleasure read – is not very pertinent to the issue. Either meaning comes from within the book – and all that went into it – or it also comes from outside of the book. If we accept the latter, what difference does it make if the added meaning is given by an academician or not?
Perhaps, Red Rocker, it’s because, with what John calls “the three pigs of literary criticism,” academics have laid down how the general reader is supposed to receive a book, and so general readers have become insecure about their instincts. Thus their embarrassment for embracing books like HP and Twilight, because these are not what “good books” are supposed to be, and mature adult readers aren’t supposed to love them. I think of Rowling’s publisher creating special HP book covers for adults, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed to read the books in public.
Red, I think your summary is a fair statement of what I think.
I look at it this way. Without a reader, a book has exactly one task — to occupy physical space. Without cracking open the book’s cover, the reader will never experience it. I don’t think meaning is situated either in a text or outside a text. Functionally, there is no difference between the two. Cultural context can help us derive meaning from a text, while what we get from a text can open our eyes to things about our culture we’d never noticed before. How that interplay aligns itself is something that cannot be predicted by any model of readership or authorship that tries to anticipate people’s reactions to a text.
In short, I don’t think meaning is a thing to be found, but a process that is both persistent and has no endpoint. It’s work (or play, depending on your preference) to be done. And it’s work we crave — hence the reason many of us have been hanging around this place for so long, and the reason Travis started it. Despite my extended absence for the last few months, I’m extremely happy to know it’s here!
Jenna, I love that joke too! Thanks for sharing the site.
revgeorge, there certainly are different circles of fandom. Many fans (even children and teenagers) look down on the “movie-watchers” (i.e. non-readers) or Wrockers whose lyrics aren’t true to the books. I was proud to have out-nerded a friend the other day, only to have my own daughter point out that I did it with a movie line, so it didn’t really count. Ouch! My point? I guess that non-text-based fans are sometimes viewed as peripheral to the world of HP. I think the books will outlast the movies, music, and YouTube videos.
Arabella, I agree that HP fandom has grown and thrived because of the Internet. There definitely would have been an audience for Middle Earth Rock and Hobbit Puppet Pals! There probably were some LOTR bands, but they would have stayed local… that one Led Zeppelin song excepted. Kinda makes me wish the Internet had been around earlier.
Dave, I would love some resources on reader-response theory. I’m an elementary teacher, not even close to a literary academic. If you know of any accessible material, please post a reference. Thanks!
Melody, just to be clear: I wasn’t trying to put down people who’ve only see the movies & not read the books. Sure, I think they’re weird & missing out on a lot but they are part of the HP fandom. I think it would be really interesting to see how someone who’s only seen the movies interacts with the various levels of HP fandom.
Dave, metaphors often confuse the issue, because we stop thinking about the thing itself, and start thinking about its representation. Agree that “meaning” is not a thing that can be “situated”. Actually, I would prefer to split “meaning” into two parts: what the author intended to be understood, and how the reader understood it, and use the word “interpretation” to describe the second part.
So yes, there is process which happens, between the author’s intent, and the reader’s interpretation. And yes, this can have many outcomes. I for one am more interested in the author’s intent and am interested in the reader’s interpretation mainly to the extent of the light it throws on the author’s intent. And in looking at different interpretations, I’m mainly interested in those of readers whose primary task is the same as mine – to try to undestand what the author meant (!) Yes, I could probably glean some meaning from a videogame or a play or a dance or a piece of music based on Harry Potter. But that meaning would be diluted by too many personal agendas; there would be too many other elements in there, limiting its usefullness for undersanding JKR’s intent.
I am hearing some deafening echoes in here of C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, which I assume would please the professor.
Or am I succumbing to the Anthropological Approach? Have you all read it, or am I projecting? (If not, go out and read it without hesitation.)
I look for the author’s intent – but I feel I need more information from the culture of the author to understand a given work. A novel does not exist in a vacuum. One can look at The Marriage of Figaro today as an opera about love, betrayal and forgiveness by Mozart. But is it that? Is it aiding in my understanding of Beaumarchais’ Trilogy of plays – or vice versa? Is it about a servant who is smarter than his master? Could it be about the common man’s rejection of Feudal Law and a try at economic noblesse oblige? Or the spark that ignites the French Revolution?
Goethe’s Werther spawned a whole movement of contagious suicide, was banned from several countries, put Weimar on the map for any young man to visit at the time. Unfathomably perplexing in today’s culture – but not so far out in the era of Sturm und Drang.
In 50 years time – Harry Potter might be equally strange – maybe they will look at a racism as perplexing as feudal law is today. And they will have to go back to study the culture from whence this work came to understand it fully. Maybe “going viral” on the internet won’t mean anything then – maybe everything will “go viral” all the time.
If that makes any sense.
Joivre, I guess I’m an immature reader. Over the last few years, I’ve taken more and more to looking at books as if they were toys. They have a design and a purpose. But good ones are shiny, bendy, and let me do other things with them that I find interesting.
Ha!
Dave, so right. That’s why the shiny, bendy ones are the classics! You never get tired of playing with them. Each time you start at level 1 – it’s a different game by level 12. I still am playing with Beaumarchais, Da Ponte, Rowling, Goethe and Heine etc. – because I will never know them completely. Isn’t that FUN!?
And you’re not immature at all – focusing on the culture surrounding a work – be it Youtube, gaming, internet communties, merchandizing, cinema, music, fisal impact, cosplay, sports, politics, and activism all are a part of this toy. If you don’t play with those pieces – you’re not experiencing the purpose and true meaning of the toy.