Fantastic Literature at the Beginning of the Third Millennium: Terror, Religion, and the Hogwarts Syndrome.

  • Danielle Gurevitch Bar Ilan University

Περίληψη

The seven books in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, published consecutively over a nine-year period, have achieved unprecedented commercial success. Given the heterogeneity of Harry Potter enthusiasts, it seems as if the whole world has been captivated by the charm of the bespectacled wizard. This article suggests that Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Sorcery trains its students to be leaders, equipping them with the necessary skills by means of pedagogical methods that reflect contemporary, non-magical, progressive Western education systems. For the construction of her plots, Rowling draws on a universal, value-oriented symbolic language (reason and ethics) associated with the cultural codes of New Spiritualism.

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Danielle Gurevitch is an ethnologist, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director and Lecturer at the Multidisciplinary Program at Bar Ilan University. Her studies include contemporary fantasy literature and its origins in Medieval English and French prose. Gurevitch is the editor (with Hagar Yanai) of With Both Feet in the Clouds: On Fantasy in Hebrew Literature, Graff and Heksherim Institute at Ben-Gurion University, 2009 (in Hebrew), and (with Elana Gomel) of With Both Feet in the Clouds: On Fantasy in Israeli Literature, Waltham, MA: Graff  Publications and Academic Press, 2012 (in English).
Τεύχος
Τόμ. 17 Αρ. 1 (2013)
Ενότητα
Alice's Academy
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