Harry Potter as a serious academic subject? What a load of Hogwarts!

By Lindsay Johns for the Daily Mail

Published: 10:50 GMT, 21 May 2012 | Updated: 10:57 GMT, 21 May 2012

The news that the first academic conference wholly devoted to the study of the Harry Potter novels as literary texts was held at the weekend at St. Andrew’s University - in which literary scholars from around the world critiqued and analysed the semiotic implications, philosophical nuances and stylistic felicities of J.K. Rowling’s magnum opus - strikes me as deeply worrying, not to mention a very sad testament to much that is currently wrong with our attitudes to modern popular culture and education.

With conference papers on the influence of C.S. Lewis on J.K. Rowling, the racial politics of goblins and the mythopoesis of the Chaucerian tradition in the novels, even I could not keep a straight face. As someone who spent several years toiling (to admittedly little avail) in the groves of post-graduate academe on medieval literature, I profess to know a little of what they speak.

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Trivial: St Andrews University is hosting an academic conference focussing on the Harry Potter novels

For me, such attempts massively over-intellectualise popular culture in general and teenage fads in particular, and thus demean the high seriousness of bona fide, rigorous academic disciplines, be it in the humanities or the sciences.

Please don’t get me wrong: this is not about being an intellectual snob. It is about caring about the nature of academia and tertiary education, high culture and what is deemed to be worthy of intellectual engagement for young people and adults alike.

Are the Harry Potter novels great books for teenagers, full of exciting stories and interesting characters, which in turn have become hugely successful films and franchises, and even, in some respects, touchstones of our popular culture? Yes indeed.

Have the books and subsequent films given an abundance of joy and pleasure to millions the world over? Undoubtedly, and for that they should be rightly celebrated.

Moreover, have the Harry Potter books been instrumental in getting legions of young people to develop and nurture a love of reading, which can only be a great thing? Again, absolutely. So on those fronts I am a big fan. I even bought a couple of them for my little cousin.

But are the magical adventures and peregrinations of Harry Potter worthy of serious academic and literary study by professional scholars? Of course not. They are books written with the express purpose of entertaining children, and we forget that at our peril.

Good fun: The Harry Potter books and films are loved the world over, but that doesn't mean people should study them too seriously

Similarly I was in my local library last week perusing the shelves when I came across a scholarly book on Jamaican dancehall sound system culture. As someone who has proudly spent many happy hours in the salubrious (and on some occasions, insalubrious) dancehalls of London, New York and Kingston, I was initially intrigued by the fact that someone would devote copious amounts of time and intellectual energy to a subject which, by its very nature, seems to defy it (and I speak as one who, in the main, loves ragga music, but would never dare to over-stress its intellectual content).

Actively over-intellectualising aspects of popular culture is akin to vainglorious intellectual masturbation. I have written here recently of my penchant for Rambo, so I am certainly not saying that we cannot learn edifying things from what is deemed to be 'low brow' entertainment. As a social phenomenon, I can even see the interest of Harry Potter. But as a literary text worthy of its own academic conference? Come off it! This strikes me as remarkably self-indulgent on the part of those involved.

What is all the more surprising is that St. Andrews is no former polytechnic, but is one of Britain’s top educational institutions which boasts, among many other illustrious alumni, a royal pedigree in the shape of Prince William.

Furthermore, at a time when universities up and down the land are arguably encountering the biggest cuts to their funding and threats to their well-being in the history of higher education, one would have thought that perilously placed academics would have had better things to focus their attentions and their formidable intellects on.

I am certainly not against the Harry Books per se, or for that matter against the genre of teenage fiction. On the contrary, I think that some teenage fiction is excellent. I could cite as a recent example Doglands by Tim Willocks – a superb allegorical tale set in the canine world which at its core questions what it means to be truly free in a modern society given over to consumerism and blind conformism. A truly life-affirming book, Doglands lyrically articulates the nobility of the human spirit and in beautifully ornate yet lucid prose asserts defiance and bravery in the face of oppression – a worthy moral for any young person.

But I am against slavishly genuflecting before (and thus countenancing) the vacuous fripperies and inane whims and caprices of popular youth culture, in the name of fusing ostensible academic rigour with oh-so-cool, 'down with the kids' street cred. Whatever next? Will we soon witness PhD viva questions on the racial significance of Will i. Am’s live tweeting on The Voice or 100,000 word doctoral dissertations on the cultural hermeneutics of Lady Gaga’s sartorial choices? I hope not. Media and cultural studies, cultural relativism and the relentless dumbing down of our educational system have a lot to answer for!

Virgil, Ovid and Boethius, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton or Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Alex La Guma - to name a few famous poets and authors from the classical, Renaissance and modern world respectively, strike me as authors who merit serious literary study and I wager they still will when transient fads are long forgotten.

Harry Potter, Hogwarts, platform nine-and-three-quarters and quidditch are all wonderfully powerful and evocative literary inventions which have beguiled and thrilled many millions of teenagers around the globe. As such, they certainly deserve their own rightful place in the literary pantheon. But by trivializing the nature of proper academic study with such blatant pandering to spurious zeitgeist gimmicks which highlight our perilous obsession with youth culture, we are in danger of actively embracing infantilism and regression. In so doing, we are not only devaluing a nation's distinguished academic heritage, but also sending out a very foolish message to subsequent generations, which would be both a great shame and a grave error.

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