Thread by @sentantiq

#WorldsNotAuthors

My children are secretly making holiday gifts for each other. I walked into the office and found my daughter writing a Hogwarts acceptance letter for her brother, because he wants magic to be real.

1/

Let's just say I left the room and had sudden, prolonged attack of itchy eyes.

This was the same day JKR was in the news for supporting bigotry and not supporting transgendered people.

#WorldsNotAuthors

2/

As many of my students know, I really resisted the whole Harry Potter thing for years because I was already teaching when it started and I was frustrated that at the core it is just the same old heroic narrative recycled

The heroic pattern is harmful.

#WorldsNotAuthors

3/

The basic heroic narrative is regressive, heteronormative, male-centered, and often, when realized in a western context, racist

It limits roles, sets people up for severe disappointment, and can also eventuate in violence

I have written about this

sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/09/11/a-s…

4/

I was worried about this when my kids started reading the books because narratives can have such powerful impact on how we view ourselves in the world. My children are young, already shaped by social expectations for gender. Also: bi-racial, not christian

#WorldsNotAuthors

5/

I was worried they would not see themselves in the books or would simply see themselves as peripheral. The indian characters in the book are mere UK atmosphere props, like chicken curry in a pub.

#WorldsNotAuthors

6/

But oh, how they fell in love. My daughter, older but slower to read, started listening to the audiobooks while reading and made a huge leap. We all listened together in the car and I cried uncontrollably at their smiles when Griffindor won the house cup at he end of book 1

7/

Over six months we listened to all the books together, they read them separately, and they watched the movies. They are now re-listening to the books any time we drive

I don't know what they have absorbed and what they haven't, but the world is theirs now
#WorldsNotAuthors

8/

They don't know who JK Rowling is. They know the story and they love it. they remake the stories in their play and they find their own lives within it.

#WorldsNotAuthors
9/

We lionize authors/creators/artists mistakenly, partly because of the author/god metaphor but also because of capitalism and individualism. But this is a backwards way of seeing human creativity and creation

10/
#WorldsNotAuthors

As a Homerist I fight this all the time. 1. There was no Homer, at best the name is a metonym. 2. and more important Epic and literature are a product of interaction between audiences and performers over time. Everyone always wants to talk about the performer or the audience

11/

Languages, storyworlds, conventions, areproducts of groups and multiple creators: even individual poets do what they do by contrasting with what is already there. We have a modern collective insanity when it comes to valuing the contribution of individuals and rewarding them 12/

AS others have said, the HP books are not terribly well-written and much of it is silly, retrograde, or derivative. But it works as story because young people are so willing to fall deeply, and madly in love with a world with rules, magic, and endings 13/

#WorldsNotAuthors

This inspiration comes from countless other readers, writers, storytellers, and singers. 'Great' authors just end up being in the right place and right time and have the privilege and luck to tell their stories and have them heard

14/

#worldsnotauthors

Plato has Socrates provide a simile to the rhapsode Ion in about a magnet: he argues that a singer is like a metal ring which is endowed with magnetic power because from another magnetic ring (poet) touching a magnet (the muse/god)

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/08/08/mag…

15/

#worldsNotAuthors

This is my favorite way of thinking about artistic creation: imagine if the first ring is not god, but instead human culture in its messiness, in its synchronic and diachronic forms. Authors convey this power and direct it, and audiences transmit it on.

16/ #WorldsNotAuthors

I usually take a pretty hard stance on this. If JKR wasn't going to write HP someone like her would have eventually. Our world was ready for it and the audience was willing to make it real

17/ #worldsNotAuthors

So when authors turn out to disappoint us--and they always will because they are human and not heroes in their own stories--we can ignore them and detach them from their narratives with no guilt.

#worldsNotAuthors

18/

This doesn't mean that their stories themselves are innocent. the HP universe is certainly anti-fat people, ableist, somewhat racist and heteronormative.

But it is reflecting US and our world. And as we grow older, we can see these things and make new, better stories

19/

For now, I am going to just wait to see the look on my son's face when he gets his acceptance letter. It will destroy me. But, that's probably because I'm a Hufflepuff, which is something my children, not JKR, taught me.

20/end

.@nhmeems @JasonNethercut @SarahEBond @ScullinSarah @donnazuck @MykeCole @Scaevola67 @youdontgettorun @EmilyRCWilson @ehauserwrites @jpnudell

I expanded the thread into a post, integrating some ideas from the conversation and expanding on some others

#WorldsNotAuthors

sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/12/20/har…