Revised Editions of the HP Books, My literary critique shows a need for revisions of the books |
 Apr 26 2009, 09:05 AM
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Being Eaten by the Pea Soup Posts: 33 Joined: 8:40am April 26, 2009  |
For most fans, a fully-revised seven books has to sound pretty good. Probably we all have different ideas on what a revised edition would look like. As for myself, I've written a book-length (80,000 word!) critique that spells out what I think Ms. Rowling should focus on in such a revision. The critique is unpublished and free to be read, dowloaded, used in the classroom, etc. The critique is posted in PDF format, broken out by chapter (but I plan to put an all-in-one PDF up soon), and can be found at
Destiny Unfulfilled: A Critique of the Harry Potter Series (http://www.migdalin.com/HarryPotter). I feel my main qualifications for writing the book are that I'm a (slightly disgruntled) fan of the series, and I've put a lot of effort into analyzing the seven books. To be clear, this is not a religious diatribe, political axe-grinding, nor do I attempt to take Ms. Rowling to school on who should have fallen in love with whom in the series. Rather, this is an examination of issues like the role of a protagonist, the writer's contract with her readers, characterization, shaggy dog resolutions, and so forth. The critique makes claims such as that Harry fails to fulfill his role as a protagonist and, ultimately, ceases to be even a necessary character. Hermione could easily have made it through Book 7 without Harry and Ron tagging along after her.... That seems like a fairly major problem, when the title character turns out to be unnecessary. I hope we can make enough noise to get Ms. Rowling's attention. We aren't asking for more books in the series, just that she fulfill the promises she made to us: that the books would star Harry as the hero and protagonist, that the books wouldn't be episodic, and so forth. Cheers, Jim This post has been edited by Pleione: May 9 2009, 01:30 PM
Reason for edit: Edited on request. :)
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, but I did try to indicate my tone in my lead-in with the emoticons I found. Migdalin's work is clearly designed to provoke such a response. Also, when I debate I tend to mirror the tone struck by my opponent (conciliatory or pompous). Actually, I find reading and dissecting opposing views very entertaining, so I am glad Migdalin wrote his book. Kudos 
are deserved for his massive undertaking even though I disagree with 98 % of what he wrote. 
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. And I am sure Migdalin is too judging from some of his actual posts 
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