Harry Potter and His Worlds
7.5 credits
The course "Harry Potter and His Worlds" highlights how the Harry Potter phenomenon has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives in previous research. Examples of theoretical perspectives that are applied during the course are gender perspectives, intermedia perspectives that pay attention to how the Harry Potter story has been conveyed in several different media, such as books, films and plays, and an authorial perspective that, among other things, pays attention to J. K. Rowling's attempts to control how the Harry Potter world is interpreted by its fans. The course introduces tools for understanding and interpreting children's and young adult literature, and draws attention to what distinguishes the fantasy genre and how this genre is expressed in the Harry Potter books and films. The play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the two Fantastic Beasts films are critically examined based on, among other things, their depictions of generational conflicts and LGBTQ issues. The course is examined in the form of three different writing assignments that explore different perspectives on both the Harry Potter phenomenon itself and the research that has been conducted on Harry Potter, as well as responding to other students' assignments.