SUMMATIVE COURSEWORK SUBMISSION and PLAGIARISM DECLARATION
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Course Code M C 4 3 6 Your 5 digit Candidate Number (from LFY) 1 6 8 1 7 NOT your 9 digit student number Word Count 3,017 Today’s Date 2 9 0 4 1 9 Where asked, please state the question you have 1 answered SUMMATIVE COURSEWORK SUBMISSION and PLAGIARISM DECLARATION 2018-19 Refer to the LSE Calendar and the MSc Handbook. “All work for classes and seminars as well as scripts (which include, for example, essays, dissertations and any other work, including computer programmes) must be the student's own work. Quotations must be placed properly within quotation marks or indented and must be cited fully. All paraphrased material must be acknowledged. Infringing this requirement, whether deliberately or not, or passing off the work of others as the work of the student, whether deliberately or not, is plagiarism.” Submitting the same piece of work for assessment twice may be regarded as an offence of 'self-plagiarism'. DECLARATION (without signature, to preserve anonymity): I hereby confirm, by completing this form, that the work submitted is my own (or part of a joint submission where appropriate). I confirm that I have read and understood both the LSE policy on assessment offences and the relevant parts of the MSc Handbook. Page 1 Start your essay here: Select one or a series of objects, media texts or technological features (news coverage of an event, a blog, a photo, a video clip, a TV series, a film, a statue, an app etc) and analyse its/ their representation of time and/ or memory and its potential impact on collective belonging, drawing on the academic literature. The Harry Potter franchise and its representation of time and memory have an interesting effect on collective belonging. Particularly as it relates but also diverges from other transmedia franchises (such as Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.). What is perhaps most unique about Harry Potter is the relative authorial autonomy that J.K. Rowling herself has exercised over the franchise. Indeed, beyond the fact that the franchise has yet to span generations (and multiple authors/writers such as the abovementioned franchises) J.K. Rowling has always had a proprietary hold over the canon of Harry Potter. This presents a good analogy for how time and memory are represented in the books. Particularly, the Pensieve—a magical object in the Harry Potter world that allows one to review memories—it presents memories, as fixed, whole recollections to be perused at will at the individual’s leisure. Both time and memory are suspended and fixed in a certain way that have bearing on the way the fandom collectively approaches the books. Utilizing Colin Harvey’s work on the nature of transmedia franchises to both compare and contrast the varying natures of Harry Potter’s fandom to others, I will explore this uniquely fixed representation of time and memory and how it pertains to fans collective belonging (I will not utilize any particular book or movie from the series, but rather pull from the storyworld as a whole). Accompanying that, I will explore Matt Hills’ work on “fanfac” or the autobiographical fan’s life and how it feeds in and is borne out of the collective. Interwoven throughout these two articles will be Barbie Zelizer’s more foundational work on the nature of collective memory as a field (citing such seminal authors as Halbwachs) and I will use all this to examine the collective belonging formed out of Harry Potter and what it has to bear on the current controversies surrounding J.K. Rowling’s newest revisions to the Harry Potter world—particularly as it relates to Hermione’s race in the stage play The Cursed Child and Dumbledore’s sexuality. Page 2 The way that the storyworld of Harry Potter is set up makes memory and time very constant, unchanging, and less socially influenced than the outside world. Perhaps the best indicator of the representation of memory is the Pensieve—a magical object that acts as a well of memories, it is a basin wherein one can store siphoned off memories to revisit later. It offers the implication that memories are fixed events interpreted and only influenced by the individual. There are numerous instances in the books where a character (often Dumbledore or Snape) will siphon off these memories, which will ultimately be viewed by Harry (in an instance of rule breaking). These episodes contradict many theories of individual memory such as Frederic C. Bartlett’s in which, through a series of psychological experiments, ‘…he concluded that memory could not proceed without some kind of social framework’ (Bartlett 1932). Time is also fixed in that because Wizards eschew muggle technology and live in an insular world, their notions and expressions of societal change are much less substantial. They all dress and act relatively the same, and because they use magic, have no need for any substantial changes or innovations that might change how their society operates. Of course, there are instances where they must contend with venturing into the Muggle world—which presents humorous encounters wherein they struggle with the latest technology or dressing appropriately—but once amongst themselves they have little reason to change. Collective memory is similarly fixed, in that Harry Potter’s world is situated in a Manichean, dark vs. light, post Voldemort era of peace. Recovering from, and being only so recently removed from the trauma of an evil dark wizard’s reign of terror serves to bind together the community. An additional unifying force is the fact that Wizardkind has to conceal itself from the “Muggle” (non-magic) world. Indeed, the only thing that serves to fracture the collective belonging of Wizardkind is the allegorical tensions between those wizards of “pureblood” and those that are “muggle born”. The allusions to “purity” and “bloodlines” that these wizards make obviously echo that of White supremacists, but in the Harry Potter world those fringe views are relegated to that of Death Eaters (Voldemort’s followers) and those only a degree or two removed from them. Indeed, the only characters Page 3 that utter the slur directed at Muggle-born wizards (mudbloods) are either Death Eaters or relatives of Death Eaters. All of this is to say that, as Durkheim characterized it, the wizard world’s collective memory, allow the society to ‘renew the sentiment which it has of itself and its unity’ (Durkheim, 1965, p. 420). These two separate traumas, or unifying issues, serve as an active catalyst for continuing a collective memory that ‘…suggests a deepening of the historical consciousness that becomes wedged in between the official markings of the past and ourselves in the present’ (Zelizer, 1995, p. 218). In fact, there are two dimensions to collective memory, that of ‘contestation’ where ‘earlier persistent memories crumble’ due to repeated challenges, and the dynamic of ‘reassigning group loyalties’ through the process of ‘commemoration and recollection’ that are not really necessary in the Harry Potter world (Zelizer, 1995, p. 219-220). There are fixed states and identities that with only few exceptions require little contestation. There are wizards and Muggles; there are Death Eaters and everyone else. These representations of time, memory, and collective belonging within Harry Potter, coupled with the largely singlehanded creation of the franchise by one person, has an influence on the collective belonging of the fandom—and can explain the recent controversies over J.K. Rowling’s changes to the canon. Indeed, the recent controversy surrounding the casting of a Black actress (Noma Dumezweni) to play an adult Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (a stage play about an adult Harry Potter and his friends and family) represent the type of contestation that the series’ representation, and by extension the fandom’s experience, is new to dealing with. A strong comparison can be made with the idea of the mythologies that serve often to bind what are really disparate groups into a collectivity. As Maurice Halbwachs’ first defined collective memory, ‘one may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories’ (Halbwachs 1992, p. 42). This is easy to do when, as discussed above, the parameters of time, memory and collective belonging are relatively fixed or homogenous. Indeed, like other franchises before Page 4 it, Harry Potter is a classic story of good and evil. As Hills found when writing about “fanfac” (quoting Spigel and Jenkins), ‘an array of…media texts served to evoke a collective past that was discussed in remarkably conventionalised ways. These memories may have differed in details, but their basic narrative form and themes were strikingly shaped by cultural, rather than simply individuated, codes of storytelling’ (Spigel and Jenkins 1991, p. 134-35). That is to say such fan experiences as fans first experiences or the ubiquity of the franchise in their lives are ‘communally shared through specific narratives’ but in reality ‘…collective memory remains a dynamic system, open to renegotiation and fan-cultural struggle’ (Hills, 2014, p. 40). Precisely having White and or normative identities must be taken into consideration—especially considering the current controversies surrounding J.K. Rowling’s character decisions. As Andre Carrington said referring to the related genres of fantasy and science fiction, ‘…White people, in the aggregate, find representations of themselves in the genre to be much the same as they are elsewhere in culture: normative, benign, and frequent. This presumptive affinity for the imagery typically on display in popular culture is so thoroughly naturalized that it is often overlooked as a defining aspect of White privilege’ (Carrington 2016, p.