Guest post: A highly stunted cultural exposure
Originally a comment by Enzyme on It would be so easy to move on.
That made me think of Daniel Barenboim taking Wagner to Israel, too.
On a more general point, I wonder whether the reason they can’t leave Harry Potter alone is that most of the complainants are of the internet-in-the-bedroom cohort. They’re the generation that grew up online, rather than reading. As such, I would not be surprised if HP is the only book/s they have ever read, or at least the only ones that they’ve read aside from those they were required to read at school. Their cultural exposure is, I strongly suspect, highly stunted.
Harry Potter blocks off most of the horizon because they genuinely don’t know how big the horizon is.
And lest it sound like I’m being disdainful – oh, all right then: I am, a bit – they’re products of a culture. We can’t hold them to blame for having intellectual rickets when it’s the culture generally that’s kept them out of the sun.
I think that’s a highly likely speculation. One thing I’ve noticed about true HP fans is that they have no idea how derivative the stories are. (I wasn’t the generation to read them anyway, but I only got about halfway through the first one before getting bored with it, as there wasn’t one single thing in it that I hadn’t encountered before, and in cleverer and more original ways, in other stories.)
It’s Tom Brown’s School Days but with wizards… if you’ve not read any British boarding school literature it’s not a bad place to start. Rowling knows how to paint a picture and stuff it with plenty of color.
“intellectual rickets”
Good one!
A general yes. I would suggest they try The Wizard of Earthsea for a wizard school. It’s short as well.
@Blood Knight – British boarding school literature is a huge field. I read loads of them as a girl, though practically everyone where I was born went to a day state school. In some ways, girls’ schools stories were quite feminist. The authority figures were all women (head mistress, head prefect) with different personalities, some wise and just, some mean and cruel. The competition and friendships, the loyalty and treachery were between girls. There was a drive for excellence in hockey or academic studies.
Enclosed societies with their own rules make for very good drama.
@4 sharing this for anyone who is lucky enough not to have read it yet:
http://crimereview.co.uk/page.php/review/6882
I suspect that few of the “internet-in-the-bedroom cohort” have read the books; they are more likely to have taken the easy way and streamed the movies.
They are like their parents, too intellectually lazy to read long form journalism, too easily swayed by Fox “News”.