On Writing About Harry Potter

It is with regret that I tell you all that I do not have a book review for this week. The book that I was so excited to write about is lost in the chaos that is my half-unpacked bedroom and I didn’t have time to finish it by my Thursday night deadline, a combination of physical therapy, work, and travel getting in my way. In lieu of a proper book review, I would like to discuss my favorite book series, Harry Potter.

Writing about Harry Potter is difficult these days. Things were much more straightforward when we only had the seven books, but with the advent of Pottermore, what is and isn’t canon has become more and more of a question. In the beginning, I tried to keep up, but recently I have been more of an advocate for returning to the original seven texts whenever I am in any sort of doubt.

When I write about Harry Potter, I try to stick to the main text as my base of evidence, though I will admit to a certain amount of cherry-picking when it comes to the extended Harry Potter universe. The fact of the matter is that I had to come up with a system, because I do tend to spend a great deal of my time thinking and writing about Harry Potter.

One of my primary missions while I was in college (other than simply graduating) was to make sure that every semester I made a significant Harry Potter reference in at least one of my graded assignments every semester. I am pleased to say that I succeeded, and my final Harry Potter essay was worth 60% of my grade in the last class I needed to complete my major. I’m quite proud of this paper, which I worked on with no small amount of dedication (as anyone who had an essay worth 60% of their grade would) which is why I posted it on this site in the first place. The paper is concerned with the representation of fate and free will and agency as a concept in the Harry Potter universe, and is very much tailored to the religious philosophy that predated modernity, which was the primary focus of that class. If you would like to read the entire essay you can do so here, though I recommend setting some time aside to do so, since it is on the longer side.

While I wrote many papers about Harry Potter during my undergraduate career at Brandeis, the only other one that I felt was worth posting is an essay that I wrote for my Introduction to Global Literature course, which I took spring of my sophomore year. The essay compares how morality is conveyed via fantastic literature versus how it is conveyed in realistic literature, contrasting the Harry Potter series with Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. If you would like to read that essay you can find it here, and I do promise that it is shorter than the other one, having a different length requirement and being worth a much smaller portion of the grade – 20% I believe, but I’m too lazy to track down my old syllabus.

I’m considering digging up some of my older Harry Potter essays that I wrote back in middle/ early high school, when I felt the pain that many teenagers feel of the world having turned its back on me, which is when I turned to the Harry Potter series. Depending on how much I agree or disagree with the thoughts of my former self – not to mention my former self’s attention to grammar – I might end up posting them, or at least my revised commentary on them.

In any case, don’t expect this to be the last discussion of Harry Potter on this blog, and tune in next week for mystery topic on Tuesday and a guaranteed book review on Friday.

Cheers,

Talia