A MAGICAL DEFENSE
(In response to Sean McCauley’s Aug. 19 column, “Harry Potter and its unfavorable effects on our culture.”)
As the Honors Faculty Fellow who designed and taught the “Harry Potter Inside and Out” course which was offered for the first time in the spring 2011, and which Sean McCauley mentions (favorably) in his column, I am happy to affirm his skepticism and appreciate the critical eye he casts upon the Harry Potter phenomenon.
One of the goals of the course is to understand why the Harry Potter series ever became a cultural phenomenon, and what we should make of that fact.
Mr. McCauley makes two criticisms of the phenomenon but conflates them: (1) the social effects of the Potter phenomenon and (2) the “thought process” of “individuals who hinder their own development by clinging to a fairy tale.”
It seems hasty to judge someone’s “thought process” based on how he or she dresses or acts at a movie premiere. Mr. McCauley scolds us to not “confuse your reality with some sort of fantasy.”
But good stories should challenge “your” reality: they should help us gain a new, wider perspective on ourselves and society; they should subvert our assumptions about the way we see and understand the world; they should incite the reader to want to be a better person.
In short, the best fairy tales matter because they are firmly rooted in the human condition and explore what it means to be human.
And from that reality, they can help liberate the reader from a too-narrow vision of reality and society to a more edifying one.
Sincerely,
Joel Hunter
Faculty
