- Konchar Farr, Cecilie (Editor), Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter
children’s culture, children’s literature, fan studies, popular culture, queer, trans studies, YA literature
Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter presents new literary analyses of the Harry Potter texts in a valuable and lively collection of papers examining various aspects of the novels. The collection is a welcome addition to work done by scholars like Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, whose The Dark Fantastic included [End Page 267] Harry Potter in its theorization and call for the decolonization of speculative fiction; Tison Pugh, who considered the role of Dumbledore in the novels through the lens of queer theory (Innocence) and who, together with David L. Wallace, explored Harry Potter’s debt to the school story tradition (“Heteronormative Heroism”; “A Postscript”); Karen Westman, whose work has been fundamental in theorizing how various genres function together within the Harry Potter septet; and Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana, who consider the role of intraand intertextuality in the series. Few of these scholars’ work is acknowledged in Open at the Close. Nonetheless, the collection provides literary considerations of the Potter novels using numerous analytic and theoretical approaches.
The book begins with an occasionally contradictory introduction, setting up what Cecilia Konchar Farr claim is, in particular, Konchar Farr’s suggestion that literary studies are separate from “reception studies, new historicism, cultural studies and other disciplines” does not quite match up with her argument that literary studies now include “diverse multimedia” (xii), “postcolonial theory, feminist, queer and gender studies, digital and medical humanities, . . . eco-criticism, linguistic analysis, trauma studies and critical race theory” (xxii-xxiii). The focus on “readers in the United States,” insistence on characters’ “relatability” (xv-xvi), and suggestion that most Harry Potter fans are “young women . . . and a few men” (xxii) appear effectively undermined by, respectively, an insistence that the collection is a global one and citations of LGBTQ+ fans. While the focus on literary critical analyses of the Potter texts is welcome, the insistence on the differences between literary and other forms of criticism feels forced. Despite this framing, however, the collection is, overall, an engaging and welcome addition to Potter scholarship. It includes various methods of literary analysis, including close reading, digital humanities analyses of word frequencies and lexical densities, and distant reading, among others. The collection deploys many theoretical and methodological frameworks, including narratology, queer theory, medical humanities, and animal studies.
The first section, “Horcruxes,” includes seven long chapters. In the first chapter in the section, Konchar Farr and Amy Mars employ close and distant readings together to explore the deepening complexity of the Harry Potter septet as the series progresses. Using both forms of reading in tandem, they argue, can provide multi-faceted analyses that significantly enrich our understandings of texts or raise new questions. Konchar Farr and Mars use close reading to analyze the increasing complexity of the challenges faced by the protagonists, of the characters, and of the novels’ narrative structures, while they use distant reading to look at the increasing “word, sentence, and chapter length[s],” as well as “word frequencies and mapping, readability, and lexical density” across the novels (6). Their distant reading found that the linguistic complexity of the novels peaked in books five and six, with book five proving the most linguistically difficult. Their word mapping shows that words like “choice,” “decide,” and “thought,” as well as “death” (6, 12), peak in the seventh novel, suggesting that the series becomes more morally complex as it progresses. Their close [End Page 268] reading unveils that the narratives, plots, and characters become increasingly complex, with the seventh novel departing significantly from the school-story patterns established earlier in the series. They therefore argue that the slight decrease in linguistic complexity at the end of the series permits readers to struggle through the more difficult problems confronting the protagonists—and hence the readers—in the penultimate and final books in the septet.
The second chapter, by Emily Strand, is more colloquial than the other chapters. This rhetorically interesting chapter discusses Rowling’s prose—and how many of her choices go against the sage advice of writing teachers...