From the category archives:

Themes

Heroes and Villains

I wouldn’t normally cite anything from Entertainment Weekly as an especially interesting analysis of things literary, but the most recent issue (3 April 2009) has a piece by Jeff Jensen exploring modern America’s fascination with villains and significantly flawed heroes (“Heroes and Villains”). This passage struck me:
The current state of heroism can be summed up [...]

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Rorschach: Watchmen’s Abyss

by Dave the Longwinded 03.04.2009

Rorschach (aka Walter Kovacs) is easily one of the more (in)famous characters from Alan Moore’s world. And Dave Gibbons’s visual take on him has become iconic to many comic fans. Figure 1 demonstrates the film’s desire to be as faithful to his character design as the medium allows. The look clearly seems to draw from [...]

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Escape into the Perilous Realm

by Travis Prinzi 02.16.2009

“I don’t want to analyze a story. I don’t want to find hidden meaning. I just want to escape from the real world for a bit.”
I’m guessing you’ve either heard some variation of those words or said them yourself. Books are for “escaping.” Stories are for entertainment value. A page-turner is all we want – [...]

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C.S. Lewis Didn’t Have a Hairy Heart

by Travis Prinzi 01.25.2009

“The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” is a tale of dehumanization because of unwillingness to love, for fear of being hurt. Fear vs. Love the overriding theme of the Harry Potter stories.
I love it when I come across a comment written by someone decades or hundreds of years ago that perfectly describes a newer story I’ve recently [...]

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Harry, War Hero

by Travis Prinzi 10.09.2008

“It would have been a cop out to kill him,” J.K. Rowling says:
In many ways it would have been a neater ending to kill him. For sure, I knew that all along. felt that the books’ overriding message was that love is the most powerful force in this world. My model with Harry really was [...]

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Rowling, the Veil, and the Afterlife

by Travis Prinzi 09.26.2008

John Granger quotes a section of one of Melissa Anelli’s interviews with J.K. Rowling in which she talks about the veil and the afterlife:
But when they surround that veil [in Order of the Phoenix], I was trying to show that depending on their degree of skepticism or belief about what lay beyond – because Luna, [...]

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Voldemort is a Failed Character (Part II)

by Dave the Longwinded 08.08.2008

by Dave
Part I of this series: Why Joker Succeeds and Voldemort Fails
“Behind the scenes” is a trope of long standing tradition in many forms of literature. In a recent essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Terry W. Thompson argues that the violent deaths occur off the page as a direct result of Shelley’s love of classical [...]

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Why Joker Succeeds and Voldemort Fails (Part I)

by Dave the Longwinded 07.17.2008

by Dave
Since Deathly Hallows release last year, I’ve been perpetually puzzled by Voldemort’s characterization in the last two novels. Half Blood Prince humanizes Voldemort in a way that lends HBP a sophistication most of the earlier novels lack — Voldemort’s backstory both enlightens and befuddles the reader, at once shedding light on his origins [...]

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