| | Harry Potter Unlocked! | |
The Seven Literary Keys to the Hogwarts Saga | |
By "The Dean of Harry Potter Scholars," John Granger |
Monday, November 8 at 7:00pm |
JFK Lounge |
**This event is free and open to the SFU community and general public. It is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and counts toward CES credit. |
Harry Potter is the "Shared Text" of the young 21st Century and it has created not only a common story vocabulary for readers everywhere but also an imaginative experience we all have been through individually and together. John Granger, who has lectured on Harry Potter as literature at schools like Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, explains how Harry's adventures with Ron and Hermione provide the tools serious readers need to open up our understanding of English literature and, more important, of human life itself.
With his intellectually challenging but always fun approach, Granger discusses literary alchemy, story setting and genre, postmodern themes, the hero's journey, ring composition, Christian symbolism, and narrative misdirection to reveal the mechanics of Ms. Rowling's literary magic, why her themes and symbols resonate within us, and why knowing these details are so useful in interpreting other books and how we understand ourselves and our world. Ever wonder, really wonder, why you love these books the way you do? Come compare your conclusions to what the "Hogwarts Professor" thinks and learn why he believes the Hogwarts Saga will be a cultural foundation for generations.
John Granger has been dubbed "
The Dean of Harry Potter Scholars" by Lev Grossman,
Time magazine's book reviewer, because John has been well ahead of the critical pack in understanding the Hogwarts Saga, because he is the accepted go-to authority on Rowling's books for national media, and because of his many appearances as Featured Speaker on university campuses and academic conferences.
John has written and edited six books on the artistry and meaning of Harry Potter. His books Looking for God in Harry Potter and How Harry Cast His Spell argued that Potter-mania was due to the spiritual content and implicitly Christian meaning of the novels' predominant symbolism, an argument, though contrary to fundamentalist criticism of the books, confirmed by Ms. Rowling in 2007. He established, too, again over critical derision, in Unlocking Harry Potter and Harry Potter's Bookshelf, that the story scaffolding was Shakespearean "literary alchemy," an argument also supported by the author in interviews after John's work. His essay collections and guides are used in classrooms from Princeton and Yale to Biola and Pepperdine because of his common sense explanation that Rowling's books sell because they are written well and within the best and most successful traditions of English literature.
In addition to his talks with
Time's Lev Grossman, John has been interviewed as the Harry Potter "subject matter expert" by Tomoko Rich of
The New York Times, the
Philadelphia Inquirer, and Jeffrey Trachtenberg at
The Wall Street Journal, as well as more than one hundred radio talk shows and television programs. His interviews on national television include appearances on
CNN's Paula Zahn Now,
MSNBC's morning news program hosted by Alex Witt, and the A&E special,
The Hidden Secrets of Harry Potter, that is now a DVD extra in Warner Brothers' packaging of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. John blogs daily at
HogwartsProfessor.com, and does podCasts on,
"PotterCast" as a Potter Pundit.