Dr. Ceraldi is a professor in the Department of English, best known for starting The Many Faces of Harry Potter, arguably one of the most talked about courses at Western. Read on to find out the brains behind the magic!
Hi! Your course, English 2092, or better known as the ‘Harry Potter’ course at Western, received widespread media attention when it was announced. Did you expect this?
I did not! I was shocked – it was very very quick. I had distributed a leaflet to a class of first year students I think on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had an inbox full of messages and was being asked for an interview by the Gazette. I think they were responsible for a lot of the furor because they came out with this editorial called ‘Harry Potter and the Bird Course?’ And there was a question mark at the end because by the end of this editorial they had agreed that there was a role within the university for understanding popular culture and that there could be intellectual merit in courses of this kind. I think everybody became too enraged at the title to read all the way to the end and so there was a lot of talk, a lot of backlash – the head of the English department wrote a letter to the Gazette defending the course, and it got picked up by CBC Radio, Macleans magazine, London Free Press, and it was just shocking. I felt suddenly the sense that everybody was watching me! I had just been living my life, teaching my courses, and suddenly there was all this attention thrust upon me – it was definitely very unexpected.
Having taken the course, I know that this is definitely not a bird course! Some of the content is very deep and meaningful.
I think it’s also insulting to the students to call this a bird course. I think it was an article in the London Free Press – the article was fine, but there were a lot of comments. Never read the comments! It was people speaking pejoratively of the students, saying ‘of course they want to take this, they don’t want to do any work, get real jobs, etc, etc’ and I felt some sort of personal defensiveness, but also defensiveness of the students that had come to me in my Children’s Literature courses asking for this course because they wanted to study these books and they wanted to understand them. I knew that people were bringing a lot of motivation into this course and they did want to learn, they weren’t just there wanting an easy credit.
What was the motivation behind starting this course?
I had always taught at least one Harry Potter book in the Children’s Literature course, so for a number of years I did Philosopher’s Stone just assuming that would be the one to do if I were to only do one. I was speaking to a colleague who was teaching this at King’s University College and he mentioned that he was teaching Prisoner of Azkaban, which really does work because even for students who haven’t read the first two books it’s a self contained story that stands alone, and there’s more to dig into with that one. However, what I really, really wanted was to do Deathly Hallows, because I love that book so, so much. I read Deathly Hallows asking, can I teach this in my course? Would someone be able to read this that hadn’t read the first six books? And the answer is, no they could not – that would be a crime. The only way to teach Deathly Hallows is to teach all seven, and the only way to teach all seven is to have a course for it.
This course has been running for three years now. Have you noticed any substantial differences in students’ attitudes, work, and contributions from one year to the next?
There are lots of individual differences, but I would say the first year that the course ran, the level of fanaticism was higher than what I have since observed. I think we’re all laid back and easy going now, but those guys… I constantly felt the pressure to scramble up to their level of detailed knowledge. They were crazy, those ones, in a good way. I also find it interesting how the discussions go quite differently from one year to the next – one thing that I notice is that the Weasley twins are quite polarizing. In our class on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I talk about the Weasley twins and their treatment of Dudley as a parallel to the Death Eaters baiting the Muggles at the Quidditch World Cup. Some classes will go for that, others will not. There are some classes where everyone just leaps to Fred and George’s defence so rapidly that you really can’t sell them on any kind of critique – you know, they are using magic on someone who doesn’t understand it, and there is a level of bullying there! Even if there is a point to be said, a lot of readers feel so passionately grateful to Fred and George for the way that the bring almost the only lightening moments of humour in Order of the Phoenix, for instance – there’s a sort of group identity that a class takes on, and that group identity could say, “we are not hearing anything bad about Fred and George.” Another polarizing character is Snape, and one year there was a very vocal anti-Snape student, who just ripped him to shreds, and nobody would dare defend him after she was through with him! She was saying he was an abusive, manipulative stalker, and his love for Lily is not redeeming in any way… and I guess Dumbledore is another one. I had a really vocal anti-Dumbledore student and that shaped how the whole year went in terms of trying to frame any sort of value to Dumbledore against his problems.
What was the process of choosing the themes/texts to compare the books to?
From the very beginning, my idea for the course was to look at the seven books alongside other texts, to answer the question what are the purposes that those texts were fulfilling? I think maybe the obvious starting place was by genre, which is what I wound up with. From there, length is a huge issue – I was looking for short stories. I would love to do Dracula in our gothic unit, but it’s a really, really long book. You normally spend two weeks on it in a Victorian literature course, so as much as I would love that there just isn’t time. The Old Nurse’s Story – I taught that years ago, and I knew it was a great example of the gothic, and it would work, both for time and content.
What do you personally feel the books can offer people?
There are many ways the books can offer different things to people – I mean, the title of the course is “The Many Faces of Harry Potter”. That’s one of the things that Rowling did really well, and the little blurb I wrote for the course talks about the way the series transcends boundaries. There are things for boys to like, things for girls to like, and Rowling really proved that you could write for an audience of children without directing the book to one gender or the other, which wasn’t being done as much before these books were published. I think my understanding of the books is totally different now that my children have become old enough to read them, and so it’s become something that we share as a family. When I started reading the books to my children, they were going through a phase where they were so antagonistic towards one another, and reading the books really brought them together, since the books were something that they could share, laugh at and agree on together.
What are your plans for the future? Have you thought about expanding the course?
I think it’s going to stay the same. I am interested in the idea of expanding it to a full year, but I don’t think that would fly, I don’t think that would ever happen. If I had a whole year, I could do Dracula. I could spend two weeks on Dracula! I think it would be amazing to do this as a full year course, but I don’t think there is quite the political will in the English department to do that right now.
Finally: who is your favourite Harry Potter character/book and why?
Hermione. I love Hermione, I mean, I am Hermione! For the book… I switched to Half Blood Prince. I think it was the experience of reading the book aloud that really made me appreciate how funny it is, especially coming out of the darkness that was Order of the Phoenix. There is so much humour, and really kid friendly humour! I didn’t realize, reading the books as an adult, even as the books got darker, there was still so much for an eight-year-old to love, both in Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. I know every time Ginny referred to Fleur as “Phlegm” they literally would fall off the bed laughing. There’s so much catharsis in that type of laughter after coming out of Order of the Phoenix. One thing I really appreciated about Half Blood Prince is that each chapter is its own short story, some of them are funny, some of them are deeply meaningful, sad stories… I think that was the book where Rowling really perfected the short story form, even in the midst of a novel, in a series of seven novels.
That’s all our questions. Thank you so much for sitting down to talk to us!
No problem!