Thread: Is Harry Potter Literature?

"Take the Potter-books. I doubt Rowling puts marketability over what she considers important. I also doubt she's out to advance the art of writing or to achieve compositional excellence (although she does appear to be willing to learn; the first chapter of book 7 is a well written as the next-to last is atrocious - statement of taste involved). From both books and interview I'd argue that the priority, for Rowling, is story telling."

Basically, I agree with that. Actually, I was planning on saying that.

Originally Posted by Mike C

Star Wars ruined American movies. We still do some good stuff in Europe.

That is a complete, false and ignorant generalization and I would be very much mad at you if that sentence wasn't successful at being a rather amusing joke.

Harry Potter will not stand the test of time - fortunately/unfortunately we live in societies that are always looking for "the next big thing"

Originally Posted by lilacstarflower

Harry Potter will not stand the test of time - fortunately/unfortunately we live in societies that are always looking for "the next big thing"

While it's possible that you're correct, it's far to early to tell. After all, some popular things do last, otherwise we wouldn't remember folks like Elvis or Beatles or for that matter books like Lord of the Rings or anything by Shakespeare. As much as I dislike clichés, only time will tell.

yeah i agree its probably too early to tell but i just think that today the people who run these businesses are out for the big bucks rather than hyping up true quality - compared with earlier decades like the fifties and such.

Originally Posted by lilacstarflower

yeah i agree its probably too early to tell but i just think that today the people who run these businesses are out for the big bucks rather than hyping up true quality - compared with earlier decades like the fifties and such.

You're right, but I don't think that's something new. People running businesses have always been in it to make money, otherwise they wouldn't succeed. I doubt the people paying Shakespeare to write plays did it because they thought he wrote awesome plays, they did it because they knew people were willing to pay money to go to the theater.
Of course, there are some exceptions to this where rich people have spent money on artists without expecting more money in return (they did to increase their reputation) but the last hundred years or so those have been very rare.

Originally Posted by JosephB

Exactly.

My kids love reading Harry Potter and I enjoy reading it to them. But if you're over 15 or 16 and still obsessing over Harry Potter, that's just weird. They are children's books.

I hate being the guy citing history over and over but Harry Potter wouldn't exactly be the first case of something created for kids appealing to all ages? Personally, I'm not that big of a Potter fan (the books are good but not incredible) but I don't find it particularly odd when people over sixteen obsesses with them. It's not like it's the first time people are obsessing over a book series either.

Agree completely. People get really messed up on stuff like this.

Is Peter Pan a children's book? Oh, yeah? Have you read it? Not the books based on Disney movies, I mean the original book. With all the psychological stuff about Hook and how he admires/resents Smee from their association at public school? Etc.

Drawing lines like that just hems in your world.

So does drawing the line of "this is literature and all those books aren't" or "this is art and all that other painting and sculpture and music isn't". It's bullshit and doomed to be restrictive and ridiculous.

Originally Posted by lin

So does drawing the line of "this is literature and all those books aren't" or "this is art and all that other painting and sculpture and music isn't". It's bullshit and doomed to be restrictive and ridiculous.

Indeed. I actually don't really understand the initial question in this thread, why wouldn't it be literature? To me, everything published is literature, even if it really, really sucks. Also, a year ago I studied Literature Science (is there something like that in English? I might have translated it wrong) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkaban was one of the books we studied, so according to my university Harry Potter is very much literature.

So we can conclude Eragon is also literature.

Any book that is published is literature.

Thank God.

Originally Posted by Truth-Teller

So we can conclude Eragon is also literature.

Any book that is published is literature.

Thank God.

Well, yeah. Now, if we're talking great literature it's another matter, but we're just talking literature.

But perhaps you have a different defination of the word?

Of course, the definitition of "great" is also slippery.

Literature and art are best described by the old saw, "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it."

BTW:

Here's the type of lines I used to hear around the workplaces a lot:

Did we print up the literature for that ice ax yet?

Did you get the art for the GoreTex brochure?