Abstract
When I asserted that in talking about ‘children’ as readers of the Harry Potter books (actually any book) we — primarily adults — are presenting ‘children’ as ‘a category or collection of subjectivities with social and political effect’, I am aware that I have stepped into the, in this context frowned-upon, register of the serious. I have done this already by stating earlier (with what was, I hope, a tantalizing lack of explanation) that the main interest of this essay is the ‘political and social effects that constitute the Harry Potter phenomenon’. Such statements could all too easily become fodder for negative perceptions of academic jargonizing, the pretentiously intellectual, the nit-pickingly pedantic … — all terms replete with a sense of the mismatch between object and analysis. This perception could take two forms. It could be observed that the Harry Potter books are aesthetically too slight, too much the sphere of light reading, too attuned to an uncritical child world, too removed from the here and the now in their content to deserve such hefty critical apparatus as political and social analysis.
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Notes
Reportedly Harold Bloom (author of The Western Canon [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995] and a highly regarded literary critic) said on the PBS interview programme ‘Charlie Rose’ of the Harry Potter books that: ‘I think that’s not reading because there’s nothing there to read. They’re just an endless string of clichés. I cannot think that does anyone any good…. That’s not Wind in the Willows. That’s not Through the Looking Glass. … It’s just really slop.’ Quoted in Jamie Allen, ‘“Harry” and Hype’, 13 July 2000, http://www.CNN.com Book News. Also see Harold Bloom, ‘Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes’, Wall Street Journal 11 July 2000, A26.
‘Survey — UK Middle Market Companies: Harry Potter Wield His Magic Wand’, Financial Times, 9 March 2001, at http://www.FT.com
Ibid.
Simon Bowers, ‘Bloomsbury Predicts Another Magic Year With Harry’, Guardian Unlimited, 21 March 2002, at http://www.guardian.co.uk
Jim Milliot, ‘Profits Jump 27% in Scholastic’s Children’s Publishing Group’, http://www.PublishersWeekly.com on 9 March 2001.
For example, Stephen Brown, ‘Harry Potter and the Marketing Mystery’, Journal of Markering 66:1, January 2002, 126–30; Stephen Brown, ‘Marketing for Muggles’, Business Horizons 45:1, January/February 2002, 6–14; Geoff Williams, ‘Harry Potter and … the Trials of Growing a Business … the Rewards of Independence and Ownership’, Entrepreneur February 2001, 62–5. Also see Ch. 2 n. 1 above.
About the banning in UK — ‘School Bans Harry Potter’, BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk), 29 March 2000; in Australia — ‘Schools Ban Potter “Occult” Books,’ BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk), 29 November 2001; in Canada, ‘Harry Potter Wins Round Against Canadian Muggles,’ http://www.CNN.com, 20 September 2000; Germany, reported on http://www.CNN.com on 28 November 2000; UAE — ‘Emirates Ban Potter Books’, BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk), 12 February 2002; Taiwan, ‘Harry Potter “Evil,” Says Taiwan Church’, http://www.CNN.com, 15 November 2001.
For example, Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible (Camp Hill, Penn.: Horizon, 2001); Connie Neal, What’s a Christian to Do With Harry Potter? (Colorado Springs, Col.: WaterBrook, 2001).
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© 2003 Suman Gupta
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Gupta, S. (2003). The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects. In: Re-Reading Harry Potter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403918390_3
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