Just before the first debate, I wrote a little essay for the Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote project. Here’s a small excerpt: Donald Trump is the Voldemort of presidential candidates. Now, wait just a minute (you might object): Trump has an elaborate coif, but Voldemort is bald! And Voldemort is well-spoken, while Trump uses the vocabulary
Attention Harry Potter Fans! While you await Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (script to be published July 31), check out The Setup Wizard, the “Daily Accounts of a Muggle I.T. Guy working at Hogwarts.” Its premise is that, at Hogwarts, “students and staff alike have finally caved and demanded that their cell phones work
In remembrance of a great university press, I’m posting: my essay, “‘You Say ‘Jelly,’ I Say ‘Jello’?: Harry Potter and the Transfiguration of Language,” and a full list of each difference between the Bloomsbury (UK) and Scholastic (US) editions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books — well, to be accurate, the first three Harry Potter books, and
Children’s literature is literature. Intelligent adults already know this. However, as those of you who study or write or teach children’s literature are well aware, the world is full of alleged grown-ups who insist on spreading the myth that children’s literature is not literature, and (thus) cannot be studied as such. A week or so
I’ve managed to schedule two invited talks within three days of one another. I believe both are open to the public. The Johnson-Krauss talk (Normal, IL, 26 Mar.) definitely is open to the public, and the Harry Potter talk (Pittsburgh, PA, 23 Mar.) offers no indication that public needs permission to attend. So, if you’re
Nine years ago, I started teaching a course I called “Harry Potter’s Library: J.K. Rowling, Texts and Contexts.” Â This coming fall, I’ll be teaching it for the seventh time (eighth, if you count the semester I taught two sections). Â The course has been so popular that Kansas State University uses it in its promotional materials.
Actual bathroom graffiti advises graffiti artists: “screw all this relationship stuff on the wall. What we should really focus on is Harry Potter because those books are cooler than we’ll ever be.”
In advance of the film’s release, Kansas State University’s Media Relations asked us to talk about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Â We did. Â They taped us, and edited the results down to 3 minutes. Â Karin is on the right. Â And that’s me on the left. They also put out a news release on Friday