The best chapter by chapter breakdown of DH I've seen yet

[gillieweed.livejournal.com]

"Dan Hemmens says a lot of hilarious (and very true) things about DH."


Thanks to valis2 for this!

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It's one of the craziest threads I've ever seen on Mike's lj. Having read your original essay and enjoyed it, I didn't remember the point being to prove Rowling's religion one way or the other. It was just looking at what seemed to be going on in the story and Calvinism coming to mind as a good way of describing it. Since I did find myself literally thinking of certain characters as "the damned" and "the Elect" by the end of the book, it was a comparison that worked for me!

[gillieweed.livejournal.com]

SHE WAS MARRIED BY AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST, DAMMIT!!!! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

LOL, I love how the mouse in question is going "She's not a Calvinist so there! That automatically makes your analysis redundant," while Dan Hemmens never said she was, and simply theorised that it might have been an unconscious influence for the pre-determination notion in the HP series.

Way to miss the point, anonymouse!

Also, isn't it normal to look at an author's envioronment/cultural context to analyse their literary work? I mean if she was Shakespeare then a discussion of the culture of the times or their personal background is a valid form of analysing their work, right? I mean I don't know much about Lit. Theory, but I reckon that's an acceptable method... so I don't really see what Dan Hemmens would be doing wrong even if he did start off assuming she was a Calvinist. (Which he didn't, anyway...)

[(Anonymous)]

That's more or less what I was getting at. Jim Smith wrote an interesting but I think ultimately point-missing rebuttal (since I think he too was assuming that I was trying to prove that JKR was a Calvinist, rather than - as you say - using Calvinist doctrine as an analogy for the way HP character seem to be either saved or damned from birth).

Enjoying your recaps, by the way.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Yeah, I understanding the position of saying that without God it can't be Calvinist. It just still very much feels like the same idea, only here the good are those favored by the author as heroes.