With Harry Potter back in the movies -- and in the news -- this is an excellent time to read what Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, wrote in "Nature, Romanticism, and Harry Potter." She looks at the great appeal of this amazing series of books by J. K Rowling, using this principle of Aesthetic Realism: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."
Ms. Reiss explains that the main opposites that the Harry Potter series puts together are the strange and the ordinary -- and those are the same opposites that Wordsworth and Coleridge were dealing with in their Lyrical Ballads of 1798! This is the greatest true honouring of Ms. Rowling's work that I've seen.
