Reaction to Potter critics
October 7, 2003 at 8:58 PM ET
James
Wizard News (via Texas Tech University Daily)
Michael Duff has penned a very funny article
about his reaction to the frequent criticism of the Harry Potter series. He divides the critics into three separate groups, based on their rants against the novels: the religious right, the extreme left, and worst of all, the cynical hipsters.
Duff farces the reactions of the most regular critics of the novels and lambasts a book comparing plot points in Harry Potter to Marxist principles.
I have a strange affection for the kid, because he is hated, equally, by the extreme right and the extreme left. A figure who can annoy both these groups must be doing something right.
Opponents of Harry Potter break down into three main categories:
(1) the religious right, who are threatened by competing visions of the supernatural.
(2) the extreme left, who are threatened by old-fashioned notions of good and evil.
(3) the cynical hipsters, who hate anything that becomes popular.
Some Christians are hostile to people who use their imagination, as if reading about magic and supernatural creatures is a kind of gateway drug that will get kids into Satanism.
...A postmodern literary scholar named Andrew Blake has just written a book called The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, a book claiming to be a Marxist critique of Harry Potter.
In other words, Blake has written a book that analyzes the Harry Potter books in terms of class struggle.
Now that is not a stupid thing to do. Rowling has put some overt class elements in her work. The wizards hate the muggles, the muggles hate the wizards and the house elves are literal slaves.
But here's a quote from the back of the book. Pierre Bruno of Liberation magazine says, Harry Potter is a sexist neo-conservative autocrat.
This quote is so absurd I don't know where to begin.