Open at the Close

Literary Essays on Harry Potter

Cecilia Konchar Farr, Cecilia Konchar Farr

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496839336
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Contributions by Lauren R. Carmacci, Keridiana Chez, Kate Glassman, John Granger, Marie Schilling Grogan, Beatrice Groves, Tolonda Henderson, Nusaiba Imady, Cecilia Konchar Farr, Juliana Valadão Lopes, Amy Mars, Christina Phillips-Mattson, Patrick McCauley, Jennifer M. Reeher, Jonathan A. Rose, and Emily StrandDespite their decades-long, phenomenal success, the Harry Potter novels have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and scholars. While popular books, articles, blogs, and fan sites for general readers proliferate, and while philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and even business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars, outside of the children's books community, have paid few serious visits to the Potterverse. Could it be that scholars are still reluctant to recognize popular novels, especially those with genre labels "children's literature" or "fantasy, " as worthy subjects for academic study? This book challenges that oversight, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to twenty-first-century literary culture. In Open at the Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. They interrogate the novels on many levels, from multiple perspectives, and with various conclusions, but they come together around the overarching question: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it that makes the Harry Potter novels so exceptionally compelling, so irresistible to their readers, and so relevant in our time?

Section 1

HORCRUXES

1

ASCENDIO

A Close and Distant Reading of Progressive Complexity in the Harry Potter Series

Cecilia Konchar Farr and Amy Mars

It is a given in both scholarly and popular writing about the Harry Potter novels that this series increases in complexity as it progresses, paralleling the growth of its first readers. In this study we set out to test that widely accepted assumption.¹ A literature professor and a librarian, we use the tools of both of our disciplines, employing close and distant reading to investigate progressive complexity in the series.

What Is Close Reading?

Close reading, the central tool of literary analysis in today’s college classrooms and lecture halls, involves careful textual examination and critical evaluation. It assumes repeated rereading as it calls on its practitioners to go deeply into a book, to perceive recurrent themes, structures, and patterns, to capture symbolism and allusion, to recognize nuance, innovation, and complexity, and to pay attention to the details of language and word choice. Rooted in the practices of scriptural and classical studies, close reading has dominated literary analysis since the middle of the twentieth century, when the New Critics standardized textual practices for college students and teachers, directing “the reader’s attention to the text itself.” Close reading is now “a key requirement of the Common Core State Standards” for students at all grade levels, from primary to high school and on to college.²

What Can Close Reading Do?

There’s a reason close reading has been the preferred method of literary analysis in secondary and higher education for so long. First, it is easy to teach and test (with multiple choice and even true or false questions). But also, its deference toward the text and its attention to detail draw out insights while honing perceptiveness. In today’s skills-based assessments, it can be counted on to offer measurable results in critical reading and thinking. Perhaps most significantly for this study, it heightens our awareness to texts in productive ways. For example, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the series, we find this passage: “‘How extraordinarily like your father you are, Potter,’ Snape said suddenly, his eyes glinting” (284). Later, Professor Albus Dumbledore similarly notes, “I expect you’ll tire of hearing it, but you do look extraordinarily like James” (427). Both characters use the same phrase, “extraordinarily like,” with “extraordinarily” italicized in the text in the second occurrence. This could, with a single reading, be passed over as coincidence. But a careful rereading with attention to the details of word choice would recognize what we discover later, that Professor Severus Snape and Headmaster Dumbledore talk about Harry when he’s not around, that they are bound to one another by their commitment to watch over Harry and keep him safe. The depth and authenticity of this commitment, originating with Harry’s parents’ death, is central to the seven-novel narrative. While Snape and Dumbledore experience their pledge to protect Harry differently—Snape heavily, as punitive and ultimately redemptive, and Dumbledore more lightly, as paternal and quite possibly self-serving—it drives their relationship with one another. As these passages remind us, Snape and Dumbledore are allies, and being “extraordinarily like” James Potter elicits opposing responses from them for a multitude of reasons that readers won’t fully understand until book 7, reasons only suggested here in the repeated and nuanced phrase.

What Is Distant Reading?

“Distant reading” describes the use of quantitative, computational methods for analyzing patterns across texts.³ Like other digital humanities methods of inquiry, it is interdisciplinary, combining the tools of computer scientists (programming languages like R and Python), the concepts and terminology of corpus linguists (lexical density, type/token ratio), the quantitative measures of statisticians (frequencies, correlations), and the critical lens of literary critics and discourse analysts. The goal of distant reading (and all digital humanities methods, we would argue) is not and should not be the uncritical adoption of digital tools for the sake of “doing something digital” or “keeping up with current trends.” Rather, we maintain that digital tools should be employed in service of textual inquiry.

What Can Distant Reading Do?

Distant reading can work in tandem with close literary analysis in meaningful ways. It can lend quantitative evidence to support or contradict qualitative interpretations, deepening the discussion around a text. In one example, Sally Hunt, a professor of corpus linguistics, used word collocation and correlation to show how words signifying more passive bodily actions were more likely to be associated with female characters in the Harry Potter series, supporting her reading of gender disparity in the way agency is portrayed for male and female character.

In addition to buttressing the interpretations that arise from close reading, distant reading techniques can help discern patterns not observable through close reading—some not even humanly detectable. In a type of distant reading called stylometrics, scholars use quantitative text analysis to surface linguistic patterns that allow them to identify the authors of texts for whom authorship was previously unknown or disputed. This type of distant reading was used to reveal that crime novelist Robert Galbraith (author of The Cuckoo’s Calling) was actually J. K. Rowling.⁴ Distant reading can also be exploratory, revealing patterns that shift the direction of our research or raise new questions entirely. For example, Robert K. Nelson of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond digitized the Richmond Daily Dispatch and used topic modeling to unveil patterns in the headlines that dominated the period from 1860–1865 in this Southern, Civil War–era newspaper. Large digitization projects like this, in combination with the computational power of distant reading methods, allow scholars to detect linguistic and literary patterns at a scale that was previously not feasible through close reading alone.

Close and Distant Reading of the Harry Potter Series

In this study we used a combination of close and distant reading methods to investigate the generally recognized progressive complexity in the Harry Potter series. More specifically, our approach employs close reading to analyze complexity on three fronts: the increasing complication of the challenges and dilemmas that Harry and his friends face, the progressive development of character depth in the service of identity formation for Harry, and the gradual shift toward disruption of established narrative structures. We employ distant reading to uncover complexity at a more macro level, looking at measures such as word, sentence, and chapter length, word frequencies and mapping, readability, and lexical density.

Our hypothesis, again, was that the series increases in complexity with each novel, thus adapting to the development of the reader and underlining the age of the main characters. We find this quality of progressive complexity in Harry Potter unique in children’s series books, and, of course, in novels aimed at adults, which most often remain static at one reading level. Though others have used distant reading techniques to analyze novels in the Harry Potter series, no one has yet used distant techniques to analyze the entire series with reference to this question of complexity, nor have they used a combination of online tools and programming methods for each measure to reduce margin of error in any particular tool or application as our project does.

We found the combination of close and distant reading methods fruitful in this inquiry. Most commonly, these methods are used in isolation, or distant reading is used only to validate a close reading interpretation. Our work was more collaborative, more dialogic and iterative. For example, a close reading that posits that decisions the characters make become more challenging and fraught prompted a distant reading that looks at frequencies of words like “decide,” “decision,” “choose,” and “choice,” as they are spread throughout each book in the series.

Figure 1.1 A word map created using Voyant Tools’ Bubblelines visualization

Figure 1.2 A matrix of readability scores for each book of the Harry Potter series. With the exception of Lexile score, each number indicates the grade level at which each book is scored.

The most revealing aspect of our study came when multiple distant reading measures uncovered complexity peaking in unexpected places, specifically in books 5 and 6 rather than 7. This prompted an investigation of our assumption at the close reading level. In our case, it led to a re-examination of our working hypothesis, that final book in the series as the most mature and complex, as you will observe below.

In this process of combining close and distant reading, we uncovered unexpected nuances unavailable in either approach on its own, and we concluded that the progressive complexity we expected to affirm was not, in fact, a straight trajectory. Different methods’ points of attention revealed different peaks across the seven-novel series. This reinforced our final thesis: that close and distant reading together yield more informative results than either one alone.

Distant Reading and Crooked Lines

Lengths and Reading Levels

Perhaps the most obvious marker of increased complexity in the series is the one most easily surfaced through distant reading: the increasing length of words, sentences, chapters, and books as well as the progressive, though not completely linear, rise in reading challenge as measured by various readability scores.

Though the general trend is toward increasing length, there is a notable peak of sentence, chapter, and book length in the fifth book—a pattern we will see again in readability scores. Also notable is the way that chapter length increases gradually. Librarians who provide reader’s advisory or work with struggling readers can attest that long chapters can be a stumbling block to engagement in a book. For emerging readers, shorter chapters provide much-needed breaks as well as the positive reinforcement of completing reading milestones, which can fuel confidence and create motivation to dive deeper into the story. The gradually increasing length of chapters allows readers to build their stamina, confidence, and engagement in the world the author built—perhaps one explanation for why the Harry Potter series is famous for appealing to struggling, emerging, and even non-readers (Garlick).

Figure 1.3 Average word and sentence lengths were calculated using R and the tm package

Readability scores employ various formulas to calculate reading difficulty based on measures of word, sentences, and syllables within a text. Using the Korpus package created by Meik Michalke and the programming language R, we applied readability measures to the Harry Potter series [see figure 1.2, above]. Though there is variability between the assorted measures, two patterns stand out: the way that reading difficulty gradually increases as one progresses through the series and the curious peak in the fifth book. The increasing reading difficulty supports our theory that the series’ complexity grows in parallel with the reader but the gradual ease of readability after the fifth book is somewhat confounding. If the dilemmas faced by the characters become more complex as the series goes on, and the plot diverges from patterns in earlier books as we argue later, it stands to reason that a more “readable” text frees the reader to fully confront the level of sophistication presented in the last two books.

Vocabulary Density

Vocabulary or lexical density measures the percentage of unique words in a text. It asks what the proportion of different words to words used is overall. The simplest way to measure vocabulary density is to count the number of unique words (type) and divide it by the total number of words (tokens). This is called the type-token ratio. However, an issue arises as you begin to compare texts of different lengths: the longer the book, the higher the likelihood that words will be repeated, lowering the lexical density. To control for the skewing effects of length, the Moving Average Type-Token Ratio (MATTR) and the Mean Segmental Text-Token Ratio (MSTTR) were formulated. Both use random sampling to calculate the Type-Token Ratio, thus controlling for the skewing effects of text length. We applied each of these measures to the Harry Potter series, and, as you can see in figure 1.4, there is only a slight difference in vocabulary density between books, and where there are variations they point to the vocabulary getting less dense as the series progresses.

Figure 1.4 MATTR and MSTTR were calculated using R and the KoRpus package

How do we interpret these results? It is possible that the sampling techniques used in MATTR and MSTTR do not fully control for the skewing effects of length. Another explanation is that the higher vocabulary density in the early books is the result of the world-building required in series books, particularly in fantasy and other speculative genres. It is also important to remember that measures of vocabulary density are quantitative not qualitative. In other words, they reflect the number or unique words not the complexity of the concepts conveyed by the words. When we factor in sentence structure or use of literary devices such as metaphor, allusion, and imagery we are reminded that an author can write works of great complexity with a limited vocabulary.⁵ Thus, while these results do not support our theory of increasing complexity in the series, they also do not refute it.

Word Mapping

Distant reading methods like word mapping allow us to get a birds-eye view of a text and to map its features. Using Voyant Tools’ Bubblelines, we were able to map specific words and themes to see how their frequency changes throughout the series. Bubblelines is a visualization tool that maps a text along an x-axis and then shows where specific words appear and how often. The larger the bubble, the more mentions of that word.

We were able to put this distant reading technique in dialogue with close reading by selecting words (and their various forms and synonyms) to investigate whether concepts and themes that reflected the complexity seen at the close reading level were more frequent a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1: Horcruxes
• Section 2: Hallows
• A Coda: She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
• Contributors
• Index