Abstract
The epilogue turns to the most popular books for young readers of the last several decades to ask: where are the readers in, rather than of, the Harry Potter series? In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry and his friends are finally required to grapple with all the elements of literacy sketched out in this study. The characters in this final novel in the Harry Potter series learn to read against the fundamentalist grain of their earlier efforts. They develop a collaborative communal reading that provides a model for their implied readers and a happy ending for the series. Yet that happy ending rests on earlier compromises; reading remains both indispensable and limited in the happy outcome. The book concludes, then, with both a celebration and a caveat: adolescent reading is alive and well, and changing before our eyes.
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Notes
- 1.
In a recent Paris Review blog post, Frankie Thomas tells a lovely origin story of close reading and Harry Potter. In her version, the “secret gay love story” of Sirius Black and Remus Lupin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban made close readers of the series’ queer fans: “In those days, we were Talmudic scholars and she [J.K. Rowling] was God” (Thomas 2018).
- 2.
See Chapter 2 for a discussion of reading and school stories.
- 3.
Trelawney’s Divination seminar and Hairwoman’s efforts to teach the students in Speak to interpret Hawthorne have much in common, it seems to me, not least their insistence that there is one right answer.
- 4.
Hermione’s empathetic reading may remind us both of the gendered reading analyzed in Chapter 3 and the reading methods of marginalized youth discussed in Chapter 4. As a “Mudblood” or Muggle-born wizard, Hermione faces discrimination that her friends do not, which seems to sensitize her to the fates of other magical races, as noted above. The irony of her position is that she is, as a Muggle-born, unfamiliar with the fairy-tales in The Tales of Beedle the Bard. While the girl readers of Chapter 3 ground their reading practices in their familiarity with fairy-tales and romances, Hermione has to acquaint herself as a teenager with texts that Ron, for example, has known since childhood. Rowling’s play with gender norms here is unusual in a text and series that often relies rather heavily on gender stereotypes.
- 5.
The Tales was the first of the many spinoff texts generated by the series.
- 6.
In Proust and the Squid Maryanne Wolf makes similar connections between literacy, empathy , and agency : as Wolf notes, “the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling” (Wolf 2007, 140).
- 7.
As Yung-Hsing Wu notes, “most fans agreed that the Tales represented an extension of the lessons about friendship, self-reliance, and perseverance the novels teach and, therefore, offered another opportunity to foster that moral education through reading” (Wu 2010, 200).
- 8.
Karen Coats, in her review of the Tales, suggests that “the commentary would serve as a teachable introduction for older students to the kinds of essays and topics one might take up in writing about stories” (Coats 2009, 295); while it is better than Sybil Trelawney’s “gloomy overinterpretation,” however, one might take such a suggestion with a grain of salt (Steege 2002, 153–154).
- 9.
Here we may hear prefiguring echoes of Megan Cox Gurdon’s “Darkness Too Visible,” cited in the introduction—one of many articles objecting to fictional depictions of “damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds” in YA literature.
- 10.
In a 2009 talk at Oxford University, Diane Purkiss claimed that this is Rowling’s method throughout; she particularly cited the [over]use of adverbs as a way of signposting interpretations to the unskilled reader, for example.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Epilogue: Reading Reading in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In: Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_7
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