John Granger is a speaker and writer whose principal focus is the intersection of literature, faith, and culture. He is most well known as the author of several books analysing J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. He writes a weblog called Hogwarts Professor.'
Education
Granger was born in Corning, New York and grew up in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and the University of Chicago, where he studied classical languages and literature. Granger has a Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing) from Oklahoma City University and a PhD in English Literature from Swansea University (Wales). Previously he taught Latin and English at The Asheville School, Peninsula College, and Valley Forge Military Academy.
Granger served for 6 years in the US Marine Corps including postings at the Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California, and at Camp Butler, Okinawa, Japan. He is married to Mary, is a reader in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and has seven children.
Focus
Described as "The Dean of Harry Potter Scholars" his specialisation is iconological literary criticism, reading at four layers: the surface, moral, allegorical, and sublime (anagogical). Writing about Harry Potter from this perspective, he introduced the 'Eliade thesis' to suggest a textual cause for Potter mania explaining Rowling's use of Christian Symbolism and Rowling's use of literary alchemy. Granger has demonstrated Rowling's use of 'ring composition' or chiasmus story scaffolding and eye symbolism in the Harry Potter novels, and argued that her eye symbolism in Deathly Hallows and the King's Cross scene Rowling describes as "the key" to the seven novels suggests her baseline theme is "transformed vision".
Granger brings the same literary criticism model to the allegorical and anagogical aspects of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy and C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.He has been a featured speaker at Harry Potter conferences in Orlando, Las Vegas, Toronto, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Illinois, San Francisco, Chicago, Chestnut Hill, Washington, D.C., St Andrews and Ottawa in addition to giving talks and classes on symbolist literature and iconological criticism at schools and other venues around the US. Granger has been a guest speaker at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, California, Pepperdine, Washington & Lee, La Salle, Cornell, Penn, Yale, University of Chicago, Baylor, St Andrews, the Wade Center at Wheaton College, Loyola, Augustana, UNC, USC, the New York C. S. Lewis Society, New York Public Library, and the Past Watchful Dragons C. S. Lewis Conference. He has given more than 100 radio, newspaper, and television interviews and is featured in the A&E Special 'Secrets of Harry Potter' that is an Order of the Phoenix DVD Extra.http://www.familystorytelling.net/2006/06/harry-potter-ii-interview-with-john.html
Criticism
In respect to the Harry Potter series, Granger holds, contrary to several Christian critics of the series – including Berit Kjos and Richard Abanes – that the books' magic is incantational rather than invocational, and, as such, require and support a Christian worldview rather than undermine it. Granger has debated Abanes and Catholic Potter critic Michael O’Brien on the Christian content and value of Rowling's work. This argument was later validated by Rowling in her 2007 Open Book Tour, when she commented that she thought the Christian symbolism and content of the Harry Potter novels was "obvious".
Latter-day Saint critics of Granger's exploration of Stephenie Meyer's Mormonism and its place in her Twilight novels have dismissed his work as a cursory engagement with Mormonism, uncovering subtlety where none was intended, giving Meyer the benefit of doubts never demanded, and getting Mormon popular culture plain wrong. Granger has been defended by BYU Professor Steven Walker, who Stephenie Meyer has cited as the professor who had the greatest influence on her. Walker, who is also a believing Mormon, has commented that Granger has persuaded him that "Meyer’s religious thought is so crucial to her fiction that to read it without consideration of the theology is to miss much of the point", and that Granger's work succeeds in deepening Christian's reading of theology, showing that readers enter fully into the stories because of religious depths and heights which the Twilight novels share with the best English literature.