June 2009

Serious Readers who didn’t get enough literary talk at ‘Summer School in Forks’ later this month are invited to hear Prof. Elizabeth Hardy’s thoughts on Bella and Edward as literature in July. Prof. Hardy, author of Milton, Spenser and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels and friend of this webLog, is one of ‘the few and the proud’ TwiHard set among serious literature geeks. Don’t Miss This Talk on July 26!

I’ve been asked more than once why I’m getting involved with the Twilight series. The problems with taking Bella and friends seriously as literature, I’m told, are that (1) fascination with the four books was just a Harry Potter after-shock that only the movies is sustaining, (2) dirtying one’s hands with Harlequin Romance genre work, even with the double coding the vampires and werewolves add, are bad for one’s reputation as a literary critic, and (3) Twilight readers are almost exclusively teen girls who don’t want to think about the books if that will disturb their Edward Cullen day-mares.

My extensive experience with serious readers of Harry Potter (who also were all once pigeon-holed as young people lacking lives) and my limited experience of Twi-hard readers tell me that #2 and #3 on this list are risible nonsense. But could it be true that the Twilight Saga is yesterday’s news and that the book sales have peaked and are crashing?

Sorry, that’s just not the case. Check out this response to a letter in last week’s ‘Entertainment Weekly:’ Read the rest of this entry »

I have been reading and thinking about Lev Grossman’s new book, The Magicians, the last week or so (review coming!). Last night, while thinking about how the Neitherlands in Grossman’s book resemble Lewis’s ‘Wood Between the Worlds’ in The Chronicles of Narnia, I thought to read the relevant parts of William Morris‘ Wood Beyond the World to which Lewis was clearly referring in his Christian Platonist story trope. That search led me to Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia to see what he had to say about Morris (nothing, alas).

While there, though, I noticed that Madeleine L’Engle, Duchess of Imaginative Literature, had written the foreward to Ford’s Companion. And, to my delight, I noticed that the whole thing turns on a discussion of C. S. Lewis as a writer of allegory — and the traditional Four Layers of Meaning. I think understanding these layers are key to appreciating both the artistry of better writing and the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the effect stories have on readers. My discussions of Harry Potter in The Deathly Hallows Lectures and Harry Potter’s Bookshelf are organized around this layered model and my upcoming book on the Twilight Saga, Spotlight, is also a layered discussion. (I explain the Four Layers at this Hogwarts Professor post.)

Here is Ms. L’Engle’s discussion of those layers or levels to explain Lewis’s thoughts on allegory: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome, newcomers, to Forks High School Professor, the site for serious readers of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga!

My name is John Granger, aka ‘The Hogwarts Professor,’ and I have written several books as that alias suggests on the artistry and meaning of Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter books. I read the Twilight books on the recommendation of several Potter readers and friends — and was struck by the similarity in how critics responded to both Harry and Bella’s adventures.

I’ve written nine of ten parts in a series of posts at HogwartsProfessor.com comparing and contrasting how Harry Potter and Twilight were received by critics and readers. They are the germ of the idea that become Forks High School Professor — and I hope you’ll check them out.

• For Part 1 on genre criticism, click here.
• for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here,
• for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here,
• for part 4 on the ‘derivative dismissal,’ click here,
• for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here,
• for part 6 on using traditional tools to interpret modern best sellers, click here,
• for parts 7 and 8 on what critics missed at the surface and moral levels of meaning, click here and here, and
• for part 9 on allegorical meaning, click here.

I hope to have the concluding chapter up here before I head out to Forks myself later this month for the ‘Summer School in Forks: a Twilight Symposium’ where I will be giving two talks. More on that tomorrow — along with some vampire sightings at Boston Lati, America’s oldest high school.

Thank you for joining the conversation about the Twilight books in the comment boxes below. Your comments and corrections are coveted!

A Psychological Look at Bella and Edward in Twilight and New Moon

By Deborah M. Chan

When I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, I found that the more I contemplated her characters’ emotional and psychological makeup, the more I understood them, their motivations and behavior.

I confine my thoughts to Twilight and New Moon, with some citations from Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Midnight Sun (MS online page references) and Meyer’s backstory comments at The Twilight Lexicon (TL).

Critics complain that Bella is uninteresting and flat in Twilight. But why would the narrator of her own story seemingly give us so little and be as unapproachable to readers as she is to the novel’s characters? This is partly due to a first-time author feeling her way. However, Bella herself gives us many clues about her reticence, beginning in the first chapter of Twilight. (She becomes more vibrant and three-dimensional in the subsequent books, reflecting both authorial and character growth.)

To understand Bella, we must first consider her upbringing. So we’ll first examine her parents, Charlie and Renée, acknowledging that we don’t know what shaped and formed them. Read the rest of this entry »