JK Rowling is NOT the most important literary figure of our age. That
said, Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series is entertaining and
well-executed. Rowling creates a fantastical world with compelling
characters, inventive storylines, and important philosophical themes.
Despite these virtues, Rowling’s writing remains bounded by the status
quo of her medium: the printed word. JK Rowling might be one of the
most POPULAR literary figures our age, but she is certainly not the
most important.
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Here’s my problem with J. K. Rowling: her names. Place names, people names, names of things, it doesn’t matter. For ever Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington, there are about five Ron Weasleys, for every Ottery St. Catchpole seven Knockturn Alleys. I don’t think she set out with the intention of making a multimedia franchise, but it does seem like her names often would come from a second-rate advertising firm. You know, the kind that makes Chevy ads and convinced themselves naming Nintendo’s new system the Wii was a good idea. I can just imagine J. K. Rowling the PR rep sitting across the table from J. K. Rowling the executive: “No, no, trust me, no one will think it’s over the top!” And the executive, after musing for a while, throws up her hands and says, “Sure, why not? Sirius Black it is!”
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Though there is supposed to be some level of anonymity associated with this, I have to make one potentially identifying admission. I am a lawyer. Going to law school isn’t the important thing here. On some level my brain has always operated this way. The reason for this admission is that I cannot read the topic without asking a litany of questions. What is a “literary figure” anyway? What “age” is it that we’re discussing? My brain wants to dissolve this question to its essence so it can be thoroughly answered and analyzed. But I don’t think that’s the real purpose here.
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Virtually all tragedians, one might say, use these formal elements; for in fact every drama alike has spectacle, character, plot, diction, song, and reasoning. But the most important of them is the structure of the events: [t]ragedy is not an imitation of persons, but of actions and of life….[T]he plot is the source and (as it were) the soul of tragedy; character is second.

–Aristotle, The Poetics

Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.

–William Faulkner, drunk and alone in Hollywood at the end of his career

The premise of this paper is that Aristotle has it more or less correct. Read the rest of this entry »

Well clearly JK Rowling is the most important literary figure of our age! I mean good lord, who else has accomplished what she has? Really! Let’s compare, shall we?

First off, if you look back and take a peek at other authors who have written enormously successful series of books for children, how can the others really match up? Sure, lots of people love Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, but how many copies has she sold? Where are the action figures? Ditto for Philip Pullman. And so what if C.S. Lewis sells tons of books and not just to his fellow capital-C Christians: he published The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 and they didn’t do the movie until 2005. That’s not what I call love. The first Harry Potter book was published in 1997 and the movie came out in 2001. That is what I call love. When it comes to beloved children’s literature, I’d say that’s a clean victory for JK.
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Supposedly this is the “information age”. Which means we don’t actually care about things we only care about things about things.
It’s not about witches and wizards. It’s not even really about stories about witches and wizards. It’s about wikis about stories about witches and wizards. Then again, who has time for wikis anymore? It’s about filtering mailing lists about wikis about stories about witches and wizards into an email folder which you can conveniently ignore.
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