Goodbye Mr Lensherr

[burningblood]

Over at the Bad Place I see that the old "pop-culture figure vs deity" row has broken out yet again, with the l33t ch40z majykyanz arguing that a practice centred around a pop-culture figure is every bit as powerful and rewarding and meaningful as one centred around a traditional deity; that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, if anything, a more potent

Comments

[gair]

You know, this really reminds me about the debate in 'reception'/pop culture academic circles about whether literary value exists: I think most of us feel in a sort of intuitive but quite strong way that it does, that it is possible to say that the Aeneid is better than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but it's sometimes hard to justify that in the face of people saying 'But look at all the millions of people who are appropriating and using HP for their own awesome, fabulous and politically progressive purposes, and look at how the Aeneid is only being read by an elite minority of wankers who are using it for cultural capital and to shore up the dominance of a dying aristocracy!'

So... yes, thanks for this post. It's useful to hear about what the implications for practice might actually be, from someone so self-reflective and sharp.

[burningblood]

I think the thing missing from that debate is that the HP books are fundamentally and inexcusably broken in ways that the Aeneid is not. The HP books are poorly structured in ways they don't need to be, the characters are poorly drawn in ways they don't need to be, and the events and actions depicted in the books are dodgy and messed up in ways they don't need to be. So someone could sit down and write a politically progressive fic where eg Dumbledore stands in for the wanton exploitation of relatively disadvantaged youth by entrenched patriarchal structures and Harry stands in for youth as endlessly exploitable self-renewing pool of risky labour and then Snape kills Dumbledore and then Harry and Snape get married and adopt Dobby etc

[burningblood]

To tie this into Big God Magic vs Pop Culture Magic, it might be worth looking at the issue of textual accesibility. I mean, is the Aeneid actually intrinsically "hard" in ways that HP is not? If HP is easier to read than the Aeneid (assuming a good, sensitive translation done by someone with an eye on the modern reader), isn't that because there's just less in HP to uncover