>HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled "Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!" These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that's supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters – any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other's voice, so one gets confused as to who is who. >IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.
>HB: But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.
>Byatt - Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.
Your hatred (and love of course) for the series, fans, the people being quoted and Rowling
>sad old fucks, who spent their whole lives staring at letters and writing about letters, and deluding themselves into thinking that letters are more than just silly letters, and have some supervalue in modern society, cannot compretend the concept of people just reading to have fun Colour me surprised
Hudson Davis
If you're just reading to "have fun" you might as well watch television or play video games. If you think there's nothing weird about grown women reading a children's book series religiously then I think I'm going to colour you retarded.
Christian Adams
Yes and no.
Yes, in that it's poorly written and cliches abound. It shouldn't be considered a masterpiece, for sure.
But it's not particularly awful. The reason I love the Potter series is because it was my escape from the shitty life I had. I was desperately lonely as a child, and Harry and the others were like literal friends to me. As the books were published, I grew older, so we grew up together.
While it didn't deliver or accomplish much, it does have a lot to say about acceptance to death.
And as cliche as it may be, if not Harry Potter, I might either be dead or in jail.
Joseph Watson
Wrong. There's a reason the distinction between literary and pulp fiction exists. Reading for fun is fine, so long as you make no claim that pulp novels are >great
Jack Jenkins
Incorrect. >But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them.
That's some grade A presumtion right there. How the fuck would he know that? yes the language in these books is extremly easy and accessible, but it's not devoid of content.
>I read the first in the series and it was shit!
An ancient old man Literary Critic read a book for children about magic and monsters and quips and wasnt impressed? Wow who'd thunk it!? I'm gonna start sneaking in copies of Logicus Tractatus around middle schools, maybe that way these disgusting pleb kids will learn! that'll show that Rowling!! haha!
Connor Cox
You know kids used to read Dickens and Homer, right? He's not exactly wrong.
Jaxon Rogers
Bloom wrote a whole book on good children's literature. I'm not sure why you're so asshurt that he criticized harry potter, it sounds like he ran over your dog or something.
Wyatt Carter
This. Kids used to actually study Greek and Latin and read the classics. Now schools teach muh oppression YA books. People think you're a nerd if you've read any canon Western literature. Of course they do this so people feel the need to supplement their education at university and waste four years and thousands of dollars to be "educated" on literature.
Gabriel Thompson
>you will never be an 18th century aristocratic child and have Virgil drummed into your head from the age of seven onward Why even bother desu
Liam Stewart
b-but that is just backing what he's saying about it being pure escapism like those comics movies i mean, there must have been "serious" books you could have read that would affected you more profoundly i stopped reading HP when I was around 14, the.. third, fourth one? only pretended after to fit in the guy is spot on about the characters being the same to be honest and the whole universe just does not make sense
Evan Butler
>>Byatt - Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.
This is absolutely true and I think it's a fair critique of Rowling. Compare 'magic' in Harry Potter to 'magic' in The Lord of the Rings. The magic there is connected to a broader cosmology and an ordering of the universe, which we are given strong hints about over the course of the trilogy. In Harry Potter, magic is just this thing that people can use. It's like any other tool, like a hammer or a gun or a pencil. It doesn't feel 'special,' beyond the feeling of specialness that is culturally attached to magic.
Oliver Murphy
The fuck? Do you not find reading literature fun?
Why are you even here?
Joseph Myers
He's comparing her to stuff like Alice though. They still do you dongle. I did. I also read Harry Potter.
Jeremiah Cox
i feel that calling it "fun" and thinking of it as just that is counterproductive try thinking
Grayson Ward
Reading how Michel de Montaigne was taught had me fuming in jealousy.
The motherfucker was woken up every day by a music tutor playing a violin, or a guitar. He spoke Latin as his mother tongue. >counterproductive S P O O K Y
Andrew Bell
I'm not saying escapism is healthy, but I am saying it's important to me personally.
I'll admit I can't possibly persuade anyone to think Harry Potter is good, because in this case it's purely subjective.
And for all that she is gifted enough in devising popular scenarios, the words on the page are flat. I think it was Verlaine who said that he could never write a novel because he would have to write, at some point, something like "the count walked into the drawing-room" - not a scruple that can have bothered JK Rowling, who is happy enough writing the most pedestrian descriptive prose.
Here, from page 324 of The Order of the Phoenix, to give you a typical example, are six consecutive descriptions of the way people speak. "...said Snape maliciously," "... said Harry furiously", " ... he said glumly", "... said Hermione severely", "... said Ron indignantly", " ... said Hermione loftily". Do I need to explain why that is such second-rate writing?
If I do, then that means you're one of the many adults who don't have a problem with the retreat into infantilism that your willing immersion in the Potter books represents. It doesn't make you a bad or silly person. But if you have the patience to read it without noticing how plodding it is, then you are self-evidently someone on whom the possibilities of the English language are largely lost.
This is the kind of prose that reasonably intelligent nine-year-olds consider pretty hot stuff, if they're producing it themselves; for a highly-educated woman like Rowling to knock out the same kind of material is, shall we say, somewhat disappointing.
Camden Lewis
I mean that's pretty much how Tolstoi writes.
Easton Martin
of course they're right. the thing is, people think they're standing on a treestump screaming these things, trying to stop people from reading Harry Potter. no, reporters ask them their opinion and they give the obvious answer: Harry Potter isn't great literature. what do you want well-read people to say? I think McDonald's hamburgers taste great, but I would expect a food critic to be more discerning than I am.
the problem is that people think opinions are all equal, when really how much you know about a field gives your opinion more or less weight. if you've read only twelve books in your entire life, you may think your favorite one is extraordinarily powerful, innovative, thoughtful, until you read two hundred more and realize your old favorite is actually, in the grand scheme of things, mediocre. Bloom and Byatt are experts of literature. you don't have to agree with them, but make sure you're not overestimating your own expertise when you disagree.
Anthony Green
Holy fuck that phrase is like screeching teeth deep down in my ears.
>if you've read only twelve books in your entire life, you may think your favorite one is extraordinarily powerful, innovative, thoughtful, until you read two hundred more and realize your old favorite is actually, in the grand scheme of things, mediocre.
Sadly this and never do I feel completed. This moment I want to finish my current list so I can get to know some chinese lit.
Jackson Price
harry potter is utter shit
Levi Wright
no it isn't
Asher Lewis
The art vs. escapism argument is a pretty universal thing. I don't know why it always seems to hinge on harry potter.
I don't know what good it does to have some old intellectual fuck tell you that your taste is shitty. Not like I have any idea how you convince people to read literature instead of escapism, but I don't think calling them plebs works.
Eli Lopez
dude, i don't care if you fap thinking of emma watson everyday, the books and the movies are terrible to anyone with more than 15 years old
Liam Edwards
My friend, you are on Veeky Forums, that should be taken as obvious.
I am saying HP is not shit as a children's book. It's pretty good. Imaginative, certainly not soulless, with real themes. The prose is horrendous, of course, but -- you should never read for the prose. Or, not merely for the prose.
Leo White
yes it is
Thomas Parker
no
Benjamin Rogers
>with more than 15 years old
Unrelated, but I'm curious: what's your native language. I'm thinking here about how in Spanish and German the direct translations into of a sentence expressing "I am 15 years old" are "I have 15 years". I say this because "with more than 15 years" seems very close semantically to "having more than 15 years" so I'd like to know if my guess is correct or if I'm just reaching here.
Leo Watson
Idk why the fuck everyone is saying this isn't important. Books alter your mind and your perception of the world powerfully. What goes into your head has an effect. Same for all the other media you consume --- TV you watch, magazines and newspaper articles, music you listen to, etc.
Think Plato. A poet is the greatest threat to the harmony of the state.
Now, this is especially true for children. Children are extraordinarily influenced by what they read as well as by what they watch and what other they consume, because they've had far less time to develop and to absorb a lot of life so they could make reasoned judgments on how realistic or unrealistic, moral or immoral, good or bad a work of art is.
They take what they read as gospel about human nature. Children are being educated about what the world is like and how to think and feel when they read Harry Potter (and of course also when they consume other media). If you're getting these cliched views about human nature, with, moreover, something that reinforces your childish narcissism and escapism, it's not gonna be good.
The Harry Potter series is vapidly narcissistic. Everything is about Harry, how he starts off as an abused weakling and then is revealed to be the world's most powerful wizard by absolutely no doing of his own. It doesn't matter what Harry does, what matters is that he just IS great, IS amazing no matter what, and so are his friends, of course, to the degree that they love him, but of course none of them are so great as him.
It's psychologically injurious wish-fulfillment. The morals, the divisions between good and evil, are trite and simplistic. It's clear what camp everyone falls into.
Voldemort is evil, he must be killed. Yay, he's dead, everything's better now.
The greatest it tries to develop any ambiguity is the terribly cliched Snape, basically just a shitty Byronic hero who critics are amazed by because it seems great compared to the rest of the series.
Henry Campbell
>I don't know why it always seems to hinge on harry potter Because it's extremely popular and almost universally loved. I doubt Bloom has much personal interested in Harry Potter nor do other critics of his caliber, yet he is asked to weigh in on it by reporters and other people because it's popular and that's what the general reading audience wants to hear about. I'm sure Bloom would much rather be talking about books he found more worthy of his attention, but what Bloom thinks is worthwhile and what the public adores are two very, very different things.
The lesson here is, don't go asking opinions from people who do not share public sentiments about popular media. You'll never get anything useful.
Nathan Allen
That's why I put it in scare quotes. I expected the people with more mental facility than you to be able parse out the meaning. I don't consider wallowing in mindless escapism and cheesy boarding school novels fun, but a lot of people do - which is how we get misunderstandings like this btw.
>It's purely subjective
"Well I liked it, so it must be good!" is not an argument.
Robert Clark
(2/2) What does Harry Potter teach you? It teaches you
>Just be passive, and everything will turn out right for you! Hagrid'll come on in and show you you're secretly the greatest person in the world!
It's revenge fantasy, it glorifies passivity. Harry's volition is abnegated. This is also a criticism that could be made about a lot of other children's stories: they teach passivity by having characters who are passive but virtuous triumph over characters who are evil but actually do something.
This creates a bubble of narcissism around the psyche of the child which must painfully be broken.
The child thinks that just because they don't hurt anyone and rather are the type of person to get hurt by others, they have some sort of value in life, they'll be rewarded. The actual and sad truth (as you all know) is that we all have to steer our own fates and work hard towards our happiness.
This isn't what you wanna hear if you're a kid who's been raised on Harry Potter.
Juan Price
>I think it was Verlaine who said that he could never write a novel because he would have to write, at some point, something like "the count walked into the drawing-room" This is probably the most insufferably arrogant thing I've read in a while.
Isaac Butler
There's so much projection in this post its no wonder you can't enjoy Harry Potter.
Cameron Garcia
It's pretty true, though.
Christopher Powell
If you get to a point where your ego is so massive that you believe you are above writing ordinary sentences you cannot produce anything worth reading.
Michael Ortiz
Good post, user. Thank you. Other than Bloom's stretch-their-legs "analysis", I've never seen someone give a specific critique of Harry Potter.
Could you pick an example of a good work of childrens literature and explain how/why your criticism doesn't apply to the work. (Perhaps Alice's Adventures in Wonderland since I read it recently and so am close enough to the work to be able to appreciate your analysis, but if you want to choose a different book that's fine.)
Juan Mitchell
Oh my god, I just said that isn't necessarily good, but I liked it alone. I admitted I wouldn't recommend objrctively
Your comprehension is absolutely fucked.
Liam Jones
close enough, it's actually portuguese
may as well read wikipedia articles for a kid if they shouldn't read for the prose
John Ortiz
>you are above writing ordinary sentences You're retarded if you think that's what he actually meant to say. >you cannot produce anything worth reading. Surely you've read Verlaine's poetry to confirm this, right?
Andrew Cook
Jesus christ /pol9k/ go home There is no massive fucking conspiracy by colleges to make kids idiots and force them to pay for school Kids just play a bit too much minecraft and watch a bit too much netflix
Asher Anderson
>Kids just play a bit too much minecraft and watch a bit too much netflix Because their parents minds were rotted by HARRY POTTTER
Zachary Mitchell
You're in no position to be criticising Harry Potter as either you're monstrously stupid or you read below a 3rd-grade level. A child has a more thorough understanding of the basic themes of this series then you do. I honestly feel kind of sad for you. It's hard to imagine how wretched it must be to go through life as the type of person who can produce and believe such an uncharitable and cynical piece of shit 'analysis'.
Grayson Barnes
He's mostly right though.
Sebastian Sanchez
This is some Grade-A Triggering right here.
Asher Edwards
>Dickens
Literally the Rowling of his time, but with better prose.
>Homer
>comparing the private education of aristocrat kids to that of public education of today
wew lad
wew
Robert Jackson
Bloom again:
I teach a course on how to read a poem. And I teach Shakespeare. Fall term: comedies, histories and poetry. Spring term: romances and tragedies.
I've learned in the last 15 years not to assume anything. Unless students are religious, I can't take the Bible for granted. I can't say "this has some relation to the Book of Job" because they might not know what that is.
I can't assume they've read Chaucer, either. And it's very hard to get started on Shakespeare if you haven't read Chaucer.
It used to be that you could be pretty sure that either on their own or in a good secondary school they would have read "The Iliad" or "The Odyssey." Not anymore. Now you have to send them to read it, along with "The Canterbury Tales" and the Book of Job.
They'll go, of course, and they'll read it. And they'll grasp it immediately. They're just as bright as always. But shouldn't they know it already?
Elijah Rivera
>They'll go, of course, and they'll read it. And they'll grasp it immediately. They're just as bright as always.
Wow, even Bloom can be overoptimistic.
Gavin Taylor
>"Well I liked it, so it must be good!" is not an argument.
It's literally the only argument.
Blake Reed
well, he does teach at yale
Aaron Ortiz
>Falling for the Ivy League meme
Jace Gonzalez
He makes a lot sense
That being said... Scifi/fantasy is a great way to explore "what if....." scenarios , parallel or fictional world's that can motivate people to try and change the real world to reflect the insights they gleamed from the stories from that fictional world
Mason Torres
I'm just sick of all the bloody elitism on this board. Especially when they're so completely off the mark. He's really not.There's criticism to be had for the series. However calling it a revenge fantasy that glorifies passivity is not it. Commentary like that shows that either he didn't read the series or he was unable to understand what is ultimately a children's book.
Nathan Mitchell
>I'm just sick of all the bloody elitism on this board.
That's because you're a plebeian, as opposed to a patrician.
>Especially when they're so completely off the mark.
Those critiques were on the mark though.
Joshua Powell
>I'm just sick of all the bloody elitism on this board. muh hugbox go to reddit and stay there, no one will stop you
Nolan Gonzalez
>Veeky Forums once again demonstrates that anons read only for a sense of superiority
Just go and masturbate you idiots
Christopher Diaz
>Veeky Forums once again demonstrates that anons read only for a sense of superiority
That's not why I read, but it *is* a happy a consequence. Not just a sense of superiority, but actual superiority.
Josiah Collins
As opposed to the masterful work of autism he's responding to.
Mason Murphy
I don't know, maybe you assholes should just concentrate on your own reading instead of being a nuisance around "plebs". Your opinions are completely unsolicited and more importantly, uninspired. Just regurgitating whatever your beloved Bloom says only makes you look pathetic. Not everyone reads for "muh aesthetics" like you pretend to
Josiah Carter
Yeah, go on trying to win the imaginary competition inside your head. Nobody cares. But what would I know, I'm just a redditor!
Ryder Mitchell
Walk away, brainlet.
Evan Flores
Why do you care? You don't read anyway
Xavier Martin
Kek. Veeky Forums sure is fucking delusional. The only way you can validate your lack of success in life is by shitting on successful people.
Brody Turner
Calm down, pseud
Nolan Young
>Byatt
Ayy cyka blyad.
Easton Perry
Your elitism is because Veeky Forums is a hugbox. Stop whining about popular literature being popular, you fucking contrarian
Austin Long
>He's really not.There's criticism to be had for the series. However calling it a revenge fantasy that glorifies passivity is not it. >Potter knows from his first year that Voldemort still lives and is intent on murdering him >doesn't sturdy or train with any rigor whatsoever >wins in the end everytime anyway because he is the chosen one The analysis is spot fucking on. Harry takes vastly more initiative to try and win the tri-wizard tournament than he EVER does to not be murdered. And funnily enough it's after Voldemort returns in full that he does the LEAST to prepare himself to face him (books 5/6).
Nathan Moore
>Stop whining about popular literature being popular, you fucking contrarian
It's not contrarian to point out that anything popular is, with rare exceptions, bad.
It has to be - how else will you appeal to the lowest common denominator, who also comprises the lion share of Human society?
Ironically, with the democratisation of education, fewer people now can read the Classics or other great works than was the case when education was much more exclusive.
Isaiah Gonzalez
Shitty opinions like this make me glad Dylan won the Nobel
Daniel Taylor
This is actually impressive, it formalizes and articulates my own emoted misgivings with the books and I agree with all of it precisely because I've thought all these things in a less formal form myself.
Jaxson Walker
If you have to criticise something, you need more than just buzzwords. This whole thread is a waste of time because nobody is criticising Harry Potter apart from the standard argument "it is too dumb and shallow"
Even if this sort of thing doesn't make you a contrarian, it doesn't improve the quality of discussion
Brandon Gutierrez
>h-hey guys Harry Potter sucks so much, amirite?
>y-yeah I couldn't even imagine people enjoying it!
>r-reddit!
>b-bloom says it's horrible, and his opinion notwithstanding, I genuinely believed it was cringey!
>ha-ha! Too bad those idiots will never enjoy patrician literature like we do, r-right?
>yeah!
>totally!
>let's go to Veeky Forums to check out other books to hate, eh?
Fucking circlejerking idiots
Jordan Watson
...
Matthew Turner
nice counter clockwise jerk
Wyatt Watson
...
Sebastian King
>hey are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves.
Ok, so he doesn't like escapism? Fuck off.
Mason Bell
Escapism is inherently immoral.
Landon Scott
I'm pretty sure kids aren't required to read HP. There's a big difference between reading Homer on your own, and being forced to read Homer as apart of your curriculum.
I highly doubt kids were reading anything above the level of HP because they actually wanted to.
Sebastian Edwards
The problem isn't that people read Harry Potter. It's that they never grow out of it and that's all they read (or the similar equivalent)
Camden Carter
Why? & no one cares.
Joshua Bennett
>how does capitalism work
Kayden Walker
>implying the Bible isn't the same thing
Austin Powell
>Why is it a bad thing to refuse to confront the world as it is
Carson Ortiz
go to bed martin
Hudson Ward
yeah they also used to read stuff like Billy Bunter and Edward Lear limericks
don't imagine that somehow the kids of the past were more highbrow than kids of today lightweight stuff has always existed alongside "classics" and if it lasts long enough it gets called "classics" itself
Parker Reed
Lear's patrish tho
Oliver Perry
>Just World >everything was always the same
Ayden Cox
Some once cap this analysis pls
Kayden Campbell
>Inherently
How can you use such meme words and still imagine being taken seriously?
Carson Scott
>meme words >existing
Aiden Adams
>Author of Flight to Lucifer shits on Rowling and Stephen King
Maybe Harold is just jelly?
Lucas Roberts
Bloom made an ass of himself in that article, lied blatantly about the text, and is surprised people are calling him out for his bullshit (since he usually doesn't have enough readers who aren't acolytes). More importantly, I get that Bloom is 86, but why the fuck is he calling Ieva Lesinska (who is 58) "child" repeatedly? What a condescending assclown.
Ethan Rogers
This is utter horseshit from beginning to end. Harry is passive? His cardinal defining trait is his refusal to let adults handle shit, right from the first books, where his interference actually causes almost all the problems. The kid's abusive upbringing has made him almost incapable of trusting authority figures to be honest, reliable, or even competent, and as the series progresses, he's usually right in that ethic. There has never been a children's lit series that teaches mistrust of all authority to its readers. And of course, Harry is far from "the most powerful wizard of his age." Hell, he's not even the most powerful wizard in his trio. And his virtue is often flawed, and he does cause others to be hurt and die. You either haven't read the series, or you can't see past your own theory.
Ian Wood
>There are people who unironically take Harry Potter and other YA fiction this seriously
Isaac White
Gotta love those Russian names.
Camden Hall
Frog boy, if it's a text, it can be discussed and analyzed. All this posturing, baiting and claims of irony doesn't change anything. If it's one of the most popular series in history, it needs to be looked at, whether you think the writing is shit or not. Asking Bloom for his opinion is as idiotic as asking his opinion on a top rap album: he's too far from the target audience to endure listening to it, let alone have anything insightful to say sociologically. Besides, analyzing Rowling is no worse than analyzing Radcliffe, and a lot more timely.
Jack Wood
Is this bait? What, should we only let Harry Potter scholars analyze the series? Better yet, we'll let youtubers do it and people like Bloom, who have devoted their careers to the study of the English language, can just stay out of it. You sound like a liberal desu.
Daniel Butler
It should be analyzed as a symptom of cultural decay, which Bloom is perfectly good at doing.
