Harry Potter And The Academic Obsession

No, you can’t major in Harry Potter. Not yet, anyway. But JK Rowling’s boy wizard is becoming a figure of increasing interest to academics and intellectuals who are spending hours at prestigious conferences deconstructing the world of Hogwarts and matching it up with minutiae from the history of various real-world intellectual movements. “A bit enthusiastic, perhaps, but such outsize claims may spring from insecurity. After all, no less a figure than Harold Bloom has derided Ms. Rowling’s writing as ‘goo,’ while William Safire… scornfully (though presciently) predicted that ‘scholarly tomes will be written about the underlying motifs of the Potter series,’ despite its being largely ‘a waste of adult time.'”