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>> You'd have to have been living in a cave
for the past couple of years not to have heard of Harry Potter
and the Sorcerer's Stone,
or one of the other Harry Potter books or movies.
It is largely because of the efforts of J.K. Rowling,
Peter Jackson, and others, the renewed interest in mainstream
in fantasy literature and fantasy art.
And this, classes like this one
around the country wouldn't exist
without that renewed interest.
To begin with in discussing this movie, I would remind you
of some of the things that we talked about in regards
to children's fantasy earlier in the class.
And point out that J.K. Rowling shows a great degree
of sophistication and sort
of reimagining Harry Potter's situation.
It's not unusual for the protagonist
of children's fantasy to be, sort of,
wafes [phonetic] orphans, in some, one way or another,
alienated from parental figures.
After all, the movies and books,
the plot wouldn't be very realistic
if the protagonist could simply run to a, an authority figure,
an adult to solve their problems.
What Rowling is doing in making Harry an orphan and showing
that Harry has, doesn't necessarily have the best
relationship with adults that his teachers,
he doesn't get along with his teachers,
that sometimes he's bullied by other students,
is showing a much more contemporary view
of the child situation.
And just as Harry is sometimes overwhelmed by changes,
so too modern families, children who go through broken homes,
whose parent's divorce, suddenly find themselves overwhelmed
by a change in circumstance just like Harry.
As Harry matures through the novels you see him grow
into a number of different situations, most notably the,
sort of, change from prepubescent to an interest
in the opposite sex in the most recent movies.
That sort of typifies the reading audiences kind
of experiences themselves.
So in the Harry Potter series you see Rowling showing a great
degree of sophistication
and anticipating how her reading audience is going
to perceive what is happening to Potter.
Another level of sophistication in the novels and, and much more
in the movies where the visuals of the novels are sort
of explored, is the nostalgic feel of the wizard world.
You'll notice that the cars, the buildings,
the styles of dress all have sort of a,
a feel to them, which is much older.
Okay? And if you look for a dominant time period represented
in that look and feel you really are looking at the time
with Rowling and other adults with children right now,
were children themselves.
The movie has a very nostalgic feel for, you know,
sort of the time when these adults were children themselves,
a time when, if you'll pardon the pun, magic was possible.
Now the one thing that Rowling cannot be said
to be very sophisticated about,
and the movie really highlights this,
is the way that the fantasy world is put together.
If you look for internal consistency
in the Harry Potter books and the Harry Potter movies,
you're not gonna find it.
Rowling is really doing something much more along the
lines of taking cliches from fantasy, giants, trolls,
mythological figures, potions, wands,
and sort of weaving them together in sort
of a fabula [phonetic]
that isn't necessarily internally consistent.
Even other authors who have, sort of, a wide variety
of different sources to inform their fantasy world,
such as Neil Diamond, [phonetic] have a greater degree
of consistency than Rowling creates.
But one must also remember
that these are not necessarily the concerns
of the reading audience that she is writing to.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone has to the,
the actual premise, the actual plot, the, you see Harry going
through a lot of the types of circumstances
that one would expect to encounter in a child's fantasy.
He is told not to do things by adults.
Things are not explained to him.
As he decides to investigate he becomes embroiled
in a, a larger plot.
And eventually at the climax of the movie he defeats Voldemort,
and actually accomplishes something very heroic,
or I should say, he plays a role in the defeating of Voldemort.
Largely because he went against the grain and,
and trusted himself.
If you want to sort of explore the significance
of this I would invite you to look at some
of J.K. Rowling's later works where Harry more or less comes
into his own, particularly after some of the other things
that transpire in the series.
Thank you very much.
And I will talk to you again next week.