Partners in Literary Crime – Unraveling Facticious Fiction

In the past two years, going on three, I have been working on a collaboration project with two of my colleagues from college, Molly Ellis and Eli St. Dennis. We have been working on a project that gets at the very meaning of fictional literature. We have written two papers thus far on the structural analysis of Harry Potter and the Liminality of the Abhorsen series.

Our goal is to look at modern literature and get at the basis of it’s meaning and relation to one another, culturally and structurally (not going to give away too many of the detail, there needs to be some surprise) . My thesis will be a spin off looking at it as modern myth-making.

Although we are literally now all over the place, location wise, we have been able to stay connected and work on these projects. They are two of my dearest friends, and we would not have come up with half of what we did for these projects if it weren’t for all three of our minds.  And with all the time we did spend working on these project, about less than half of that time was going on tangents. Eh, what good anthropologist doesn’t. But they have really influenced my life and I truly appreciate them as friends and colleagues.

I would also like to acknowledge Margaret Huber, retired Anthropology professor from UMW. Without her, the Harry Potter project would not have happened and we would not have tried to prove her wrong, as well as bringing her on board to our side of the Harry Potter world. And just with this past semester at school, my sanity has been in check. Being in a different area with different theoretical views of anthropology has been difficult because my school of thought and my influences are different than it is here. And I have often times battled to prove that I can be right. One thing that I have learned is that Anthropology is very open ended and there isn’t just one lens, there are many and you have to be ready to listen and defend your thoughts.  So thank you for her wisdom and preparing me for the next steps in my academic endeavors.

AND there are not many structuralist here…I really don’t think there are any to be honest. I am alone in my own school of thought. Oh well, will make things more interesting.

We had started blog, but it has come to a halt right now. You can still check it out: Potter Project

Picture is from SSA conference in Pittsburgh in 2010. In the picture is Margaret Huber, Eli St. Dennis, and myself. I hope to have a group picture with Molly soon, she was there in anthro spirit.