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Program Code:
180
Date:
Friday, August 3, 2007
Time:
2:00 PM to 2:50 PM
EST
SPEAKER
:
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about each speaker.
Karen Kebarle is a longtime HP fan with a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. She used to identify closely with Harry Potter but has come to admire Snape an awful lot, especially after he so effortlessly beats Harry in the duel in HBP. Dr. Kebarle is especially intrigued by the way Rowling uses and also plays with tried-and-true story patterns such as Cinderella, the “hero with a dark side," and the Lost Prince. She taught a course in 2004 on “Harry Potter and the Magic of Fiction”; her previous HP convention presentations were “The Risky Leap from Fairytale Hero to Resentful Teenager in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” at Convention Alley, Ottawa, 2004, and “The Half-Blood Prince and the Pampered Little Prince: Severus Snape and Harry Potter” at Lumos, Las Vegas, 2006.
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Description
After Prisoner of Azkaban, it seemed as if the climax of the Harry Potter series would be Harry's defeat of Voldemort. In this presentation I argue, however, that the part of Book 7 most worth waiting for is the climax of Harry's education, the moment in which it hits him that he has been totally wrong about Snape. "Deathly Hallows" will confirm writer Thomas Foster's idea that the true goal of the hero's journey is always self-knowledge. I argue that Harry's blindness about Snape is central both to the HP series and to Harry's character arc; Harry's very human fallibility, his capacity for emotional growth, and Snape's role in that growth, have always been one of the richest aspects of Rowling's series. I will then open things up to the audience so we can explore how Harry's struggle between blindness and insight plays out in Book 7.