Deconstructing Harry Potter
“Harry Potter and the French Connection”—the brainchild of Alan K. Smith, assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian—was no easy romp through children’s books. Rather, Smith’s class looked at J.K Rowling’s popular series within its rich historical context, with influences that include French and Italian authors of “alchemical tracts”—historical figures with names like Paracelsus and Nostradamus.
Photo by Terry Faust
The goal of the class was to develop new ways of reading the young wizard’s story—as history, as social science, as allegory, and as a study in language. “By examining the archetypes behind the characters and the plotlines, I learned as much about general psychology and sociology and the early modern period in France and parts of Italy as I did about the books themselves,” says student Jessica Huffman.
Although most of the students had read the novels before, few had engaged in the kind of nuanced and collaborative analysis the class enabled. For student Marisa Tam, the “incredibly old” primary texts were especially helpful in deepening her understanding of the novels. Tam was impressed as well by the variety of interpretations among her classmates, who shared their ideas and wrote papers in groups of three or four. For their final class project, they wrote fiction modeled after the style of Rowling’s books.
After the class ended, some of the students formed a club, Harry Potter United. As the club evolves, they hope to create a literary outreach program and sponsor discussions of witchcraft and the occult in children’s literature and film.
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