Dark Materials Trilogy Research Articles

Strange Tools and Dark Materials: Speculating Beyond Narratives with Philosophical Instruments

Although Alva Noë’s Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015) makes no direct reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), these otherwise dissimilar works share an astonishingly similar and current view of the mind: both Noë and Pullman construe cognition as embodied action that extends and reflects on its own possibilities through various instruments and technologies. For Noë, the key technology aiding this reaching of the mind is art; making and engaging with art is a self-reflexive endeavor that makes our activities available for closer examination and evaluation. By extension, works of speculative fiction could be read as illustrations of or investigations into speculative, imaginative cognition.

"Handling" Wonder: Tools, Tasks, and the Enchantment of Materialistic Engagement in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy

"Handling" Wonder: Tools, Tasks, and the Enchantment of Materialistic Engagement in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy

The essential "Star Wars"Philip Pullman's baroque aesthetics

This essay has a twofold purpose: to consider the issues of contemporary Young Adult literature addressed to “the children of the videosphere” within the context of globalized culture and to assess the importance of postmodern Baroque aesthetics in the “Star Wars” system of modern Letters and mass-media. Writers often resort to such aesthetics with the prospect of commercial hegemony, but some of them find their “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s delineation) through intertextuality – be it avowed or hidden – with the great masters of the past (William Blake and John Milton). We will investigate the secret workshop of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy and some of his other works, as well as Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and diverse literary productions. With their arresting butterflies as significant baroque emblems, these works provide a new and spellbounding vision of the Western hero and offer a new “reterritorialization” of Letters. More particularly, Philip Pullman’s literary gesture has been to extract the baroque message from the vulgarised versions of popular mass media and to give it a new distinction.Key words: Postmodern baroque, William Blake, picaresque, humour, parody, Philip Pullman, Jostein Gaarder.

The Book of Dust. Volume two: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (review)

Reviewed by: The Book of Dust. Volume two: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman Peter Fields Philip Pullman. The Book of Dust. Volume two: The Secret Commonwealth. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. 633p. In volume one of Philip Pullman's Book of Dust series, the voyage of 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead seems to have just begun as he grips the rudder of his hardy canoe, La Belle Sauvage, at the head of the irresistible currents of a Great Flood that inundated his hometown, Oxford, and the colleges collectively known as Oxford University. The new inland sea, before it subsides, is dotted by mysterious islands that belong to a "secret commonwealth." The first island features self-preoccupied guests at a rich man's estate. Their vanity is a form of damnation, preventing them from noticing the working class--Malcolm and his compatriot, 15-year-old Alice Parslow, once his worst enemy in the kitchen of his parents' tavern, but now his fellow guardian of the infant Lyra Belaqua from the clutches of the CCD, the investigative agency of the sinister Magisterium. In The Amber Spyglass, the last volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra is destined to separate painfully from her daemon, Pan, so she can find the ghost of her friend Roger. She ends by rescuing all the dead willing to leave. But years before that can happen, Malcolm does his part by tricking a swamp giant to open the water gate so La Belle Sauvage may escape the island of what seems to be upper class perdition. At the next island, Malcolm must also trick a fairy woman whose intent is to raise Lyra as her own. Malcolm and Alice escape with Lyra, but not before the woman breastfed Lyra, forever connecting her to the secret commonwealth. In the second volume of Dust, we hear no more of flood or island. Pullman leaps years ahead to when the waters are all subsided, and Malcom is an Oxford professor and Lyra an Oxford undergraduate. To the dismay of her daemon Pan (now settled in the form of a Pine Martin), Lyra is no longer the passionate young savior of our universe. She has become an insufferable skeptic, a classic sophomore, who has all but ruled out the possibility of truth. If the first volume, La Belle Sauvage, owes something to C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, then The Secret Commonwealth owes a debt to Puddleglum in [End Page 79] The Silver Chair. Pan's discontent frequently echoes that character as he takes up the cause of childlike make-believe over and against Lyra's austere grown-up reasonings, which make her miserable: "Sometimes," she confesses, "I think if I could kill myself without killing you, I might do it. I'm so unhappy" (174). Pan especially loathes the philosophical heroes of Lyra's generation, hip authors Simon Talbot and Gottfried Brande, who argue, among other things, that daemons are mere projections: "It's not just what you did then," Pan explains (referring to her abandonment of him on the shore of the Dead): "It's what you're doing now. […] You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white. […] You're under a spell—you must be" (175). At times, Pan and Lyra's differences sound like two lovers—or more aptly—a married couple breaking up. And then Pan goes missing. Meanwhile, Marcel Delamare, director of a religious agency called La Maison Juste, cleverly consolidates the power of the otherwise factionalized Magisterium under his own authority. He then turns his attention to the problem represented by rose oil, which—accidentally daubed on the lens of a lab technician's microscope—proved the existence of Dust, that quixotic substance which makes conscious the material world. Just as Lyra sets out to Anatolia to look for Pan (assuming he is looking for a mythical city of separated daemons called the Blue Hotel), her quest coincides with the machinations of Delamare in the east to take control of both roses and rose oil. Pullman's narrative sweep is visually suggestive of Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic tableau of vast...

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Reviewed by: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman Alaine Martaus Pullman, Philip The Secret Commonwealth; illus. by Chris Wormell. Knopf, 2019 [656p] (The Book of Dust: Volume Two) Library ed. ISBN 978-0-553-51067-6 $25.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-553-51066-9 $22.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-553-51068-3 $11.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9 up After the adventures of the His Dark Materials trilogy, twenty-year-old Lyra Belacqua Silvertongue has settled into the quiet life of a scholar. Of late, though, she's grown melancholy, and she and her daemon Pantalaimon are on the outs, the lasting effect of their soul-deep separation. They've no time to dwell on the scars of the past, though, because new adventure awaits, one that brings together old allies, then sends them on parallel journeys across Britain and Europe, into the deserts of Central Asia, and beyond in search of ancient ruins and a rare flower with connections to the ever-mysterious Dust. Malcolm and Alice (from La Belle Sauvage, BCCB 1/18, the prequel-styled volume that was the previous book in this second sequence) are on hand to reunite with a nearly grown-up Lyra, but the Magisterium is also rising again, with renewed authoritarian power and led by new enemies with connections to both Lyra's and Malcolm's pasts, setting up an intricately woven conflict with personal stakes and universal consequences. Knowledge of earlier volumes is a must here, but His Dark Materials fans will be thrilled to find Pullman at his best, combining global conspiracies, high-adventure quests, and private drama for a story that rarely drags and never lets go. This is definitely has more adult appeal, and the passage of in-world time makes the characters adult and many quite elderly. Still, the novel skillfully explores the boundary between precocious childhood and directionless adulthood, complete with angst and nihilism, all of which pairs nicely with its more mature themes and epistemic ruminations about magic, faith, love, and the very nature of reality. At times profound and provocative, the novel shifts between tense action and contemplative prose with ease, and for readers invested in the lives of Lyra, Pan, and friends, it packs an emotional wallop. The novel's end leaves the villains in ascendency and the large cast dispersed, isolated, and under threat, setting up a third volume that is sure to be a must-read like this one. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Beyond the Collapse of Meaning: Narratives of Monstrosity in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, consisting of The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000), is a composite of multiple narratives in which adult and adolescent monsters enact radically different modes of monstrous meaning. An agentic protagonist that embodies the abject, the monster threatens the stability of subjectivity. It is therefore paradoxically a subject arisen from, and composed of, the abject. The Authority, or God, creates a rigid cultural narrative that supports separation and hierarchy, while Lyra Belacqua, a young adolescent, provides a redemptive vision of monstrosity. Her narrative is empathic and heteroglossic, and the subjective meaning that she creates arises from a multiplicity of abject perspectives.

EGO HIPPO

This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies (“gender,” “sexuality,” age). He starts with an account of how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed, distinguishing the subjective, the intersubjective and the social. The article then investigates the politics of equating transgender and transpecies, critically examining the question of the inclusion of “xenogenders” in the trans political movement. Finally, the author returns to the magical power of metaphors, arguing that metaphors do materialize insofar as the flesh does not remain unchanged by them. Analogizing his hippo-self to a “cut” as theorized by Eva Hayward – a regeneration of the boundaries of the self – he offers a final crossing to the world of fiction by showing how the His Dark Materials trilogy outlines an aesthetics of porosity, which suggests that the self is, as much as a novel, a work of fiction.

‘DEATH’S OTHER KINGDOMS’: DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE IN SOME RECENT FANTASIES FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Trites (2000:117) argues that death is a biological imperative that possibly operates even more powerfully on the human mind than sexuality. In this article it will be suggested that coming to terms with the inevitability of mortality is a key maturational task, but that popular young adult fantasies dealing with immortal vampires or decaying zombies usually offer little or no support to adolescents struggling to deal with this issue. By contrast, it will be suggested that novels such as those in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell series, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series and Philip Pullman’s His dark materials trilogy provide adolescent readers with safe spaces in which to explore not only the threat of death, but a range of social and religious approaches to the problem. In this way, young readers may be encouraged to accept themselves, in Heidegger’s (1962 [1927]:304–307) terms, as ‘Being-towards-death’ and eventually even be empowered by such an acknowledgement.

Moral Horror and Moral Maturity: Philip Pullman’s Theological Anthropology for a Godless World

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy challenges Christianity in many ways, most strikingly in its fundamental rewriting of what goodness means. Pullman’s counter-institutional moral vision relies on individual creativity and curiosity—figured in Dust, and realised in characters’ self-appointed tasks—to counter the stultifying and murderous Church. It also requires those who would fight the Church to engage in similarly violent, destructive deeds. This engagement with evil is part of the protagonists’ moral education: in Pullman’s world, full moral responsibility requires an encounter with horror, and goodness can only be defended by those willing to do evil for its sake.

“This wild abyss”: The trope of home in Philip Pullman’s his dark materials trilogy

ABSTRACTThis article discusses His dark materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, setting his concepts of home, which I regard as bearing a resemblance to Ernst Bloch’s Heimat or homeland, in the context of a 2002 interview with him and against the background of Bloch’s “atheism in Christianity”. I ask whether, against numerous odds, the protagonists Lyra and Will reach home, in Bloch’s understanding, and suggest that Pullman introduces a further dimension. The two characters eventually come to understand that their atoms will be reunited with each other in the universe. To my mind this, not the temporal worlds or even the republic of heaven advocated by Pullman, is the culmination of the trope of home in the series. Such a reunion will constitute their true, spiritual abode. I therefore differ from the broadly Marxist, earthbound and socially directed, perspectives expressed by Bloch and Jack Zipes.

Sissy Boy Mothering: Male Child Mother Figures in Middle-Grade Fantasy Literature

As Amanda Diekman and Sarah Murnen (2004) note, studies of “nonsexist” children’s books tend to focus on girls performing stereotypically masculine behaviors without consideration of how boy characters perform gender (p. 381); however, this narrow focus on girl figures in the identification of nonsexist works has two side-effects: appearing to devalue traits traditionally considered feminine and losing sight of male characters’ subversive gender performances. The field of performance studies, focusing on codified performative acts rather than on physical traits such as biological sex, presents a new avenue for understanding how works challenge a sexist hegemony. For example, by examining characters’ performance of food-sharing, traditionally encoded as feminine/motherly, it is possible to identify nuanced performances that enrich our understanding of how gender operates in children’s literature. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, such an examination draws attention to two boy characters, Will Parry and Jeremy Thatcher, who perform a similar combination of feminine/motherly and more traditionally masculine behaviors. Further explorations of this type present the possibility of identifying new sites of gender subversion that further expand our definitions of masculinity and femininity, and of what it means to be nonsexist.

Letting Specters In: Environmental Catastrophe and the Limits of Space in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

In this essay, I examine the function of environmental catastrophe in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I argue that Lord Asriel’s bridge between worlds has irreparable consequences for the mulefa’s and the armored polar bears’ habitats. Moreover, I maintain that Will and Lyra’s agency derives not from the limitless freedom Lord Asriel seeks, but from love and responsibility. Using Lawrence Buell’s ecocritical approach and Wendell Berry’s argument for necessary limitations and placement, my reading addresses how large-scale environmental disaster in the text mirrors our own global climate crisis.

The Good Liberal and the Scoundrel Author

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has acquired an impressive critical reputation and acquired a favored role in British culture as a social commentator. This essay attempts to link the pleasures associated with the trilogy with the politics inscribed in them, and consider both in the context of Pullman's role in the civil The essay suggests that The Northern Lights offers pleasures in fantastical and metaphysical possibilities, and social confederacies that potentially offset the affective privations of neoliberalism. These possibilities are set in the context of recent theories of the enterprise society. The essay draws attention to a number of discontinuities that unfold as the trilogy progresses, and suggests that these undermine the possibilities inherent in the first novel. These discontinuities throw the role of fantasy and alternative universes into question, and reveal the limitations of Pullman's fiction. The essay considers the limit and scope of Pullman's poli...

Paola Bottalla and Monica Santini, What Are Little Boys and Girls Made Of? Gender Issues in Children's LiteratureWhat Are Little Boys and Girls Made Of ? Gender Issues in Children’s Literature. Edited by Paola Bottalla and Monica Santini. Padua: Unipress, 2009. Pp. xvii+149.

<i>Paola Bottalla</i> and <i>Monica Santini</i>, What Are Little Boys and Girls Made Of? Gender Issues in Children's Literature<i>What Are Little Boys and Girls Made Of ? Gender Issues in Children’s Literature</i>. Edited by Paola Bottalla and Monica Santini. Padua: Unipress, 2009. Pp. xvii+149.

On the closure of public libraries of Oxfordshire

Philip Pullman writes books for children. His best known is probably the His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. His most contentious probably The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. He writes not so much to explain as to allow the reader’s own imagination to work on his words. The same purpose is at the core of his belief in the value of public libraries. The debate on the role and future of public libraries in the UK was marked by the accusation that authors had their own interests in mind when they objected to library closures. Philip Pullman leapt to the attack. This is an edited version of his mauling of Oxfordshire County Council.

Philip Pullman: United Kingdom ★ Author

Philip PullmanUnited Kingdom ★ Author Lydia Kokkola “Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings.” Philip Pullman The son of an Air Force pilot, Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, but spent much of his early childhood in his Grandparents’ rectory where he heard stories combining the landscape, history, Biblical stories and fiction; elements that were to emerge in his own story-telling as an adult. At the age of eleven, his family moved to North Wales where Pullman took up illustrating. These experiences were woven into one of his earliest novels, The Broken Bridge. His formal education at Oxford University was also to produce a fictional setting as it was incorporated into the His Dark Materials trilogy. After a short but successful career as a teacher and teacher-trainer, he took up fulltime writing in 1995 following the success of Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in North America). His works have been translated into over 40 languages and include adventure stories, plays, writing for adults as the well as the fantasy and fairy tales for which he is best known. Internationally, Pullman is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy set in an alternative universe. The first novel was made into a film—The Golden Compass—and has also been successfully adapted for the stage. Pullman’s complex engagement with Christianity, spirituality and the desire to keep children “innocent,” as well as his allusions to classical works of English literature such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost make for a series of cross-over books which appeal equally, albeit differently, to children, adults, and literary critics. Prior to the publication of these works, however, Pullman had already established himself as an author of substance. The Sally Lockhart Quartet, set in London in the Victorian era, features an enterprising young woman who exposes the darker aspects of the puritanical morality and extreme class division of the period as she searches for a ruby that is rightfully hers. Pullman returned to the Victorian era in his The New Cut Gang series, which features a gang of children who appear to have stepped out of a Sherlock Holmes story. Pullman’s appreciation of Arthur Conan Doyle is also evident in his play, Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror. Pullman’s prolific and varied output, his willingness to be provocative, his complex use of allusion, and good storytelling have made him as popular with critics as he is with his child and teenage readers. Several monographs and numerous articles have been produced on his works, and he regularly speaks in public addressing issues ranging from religious tolerance to funding for public library services. Selected Publications The Ruby in the Smoke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print. Google Scholar The Broken Bridge. London: Macmillan Children’s Books 1990. Print. Google Scholar Northern Lights. London: Scholastic Point, 1995. Print. Google Scholar Clockwork Or, All Wound Up. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Print. Google Scholar I Was a Rat! or, The Scarlet Slippers. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Print. [End Page 58] Google Scholar Copyright © 2012 Bookbird, Inc

Guilt, Empathy and the Ethical Potential of Children's Literature

The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that investigates readers’ cognitive and affective engagement with literature, partly based on recent brain research. It argues that for young readers who may not yet have developed full comprehension of fundamental moral issues and who have not attained the literary competence necessary to understand fictive characters’ mental processes, representation of emotions in literature may produce a problem. Since guilt is a complex social emotion, involving a reconciliation of several contradictory goals, such representation demands well-developed empathy and advanced mind-reading skills, as well as factual knowledge of relevant legislation and understanding of moral implications of crime, guild and remorse. The paper examines these issues through a reading of two texts for young audience, Forbidden (2010), by Tabitha Suzuma, and His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), by Philip Pullman. The former is totally focused on guilt, in legal as well as moral sense, experienced by two siblings who enter an incestuous relationship. In the latter, guilt is less conspicuous, yet proves on closer consideration to be a major plot engine in the protagonist Lyra’s physical and spiritual quest. While Suzuma’s novel has an overt educational agenda, it is ambiguous in supporting young readers’ ethical position towards the protagonists’ guilt. In Pullman’s trilogy, guilt becomes closely connected with the fundamental philosophical issues of determinism and free will. Although Pullman does not provide any clear-cut ethical guidance either, the use of emotion discourse, or emotion ekphrasis, is more subtle, not least because the genre allows a outward projection of emotions in the form of dæmons. Lyra’s guilt becomes a driving engine in her maturation process. The ultimate argument of the paper is that literature provides an excellent training field for young readers’ developing of empathy skills, and the vicarious experience of guilt exposes readers to a wide range of ethical questions.Keywords: children’s literature; young adult literature; cognitive criticism; emotions; empathy; ethics; emotional education; Pullman; Suzuma(Published: 15 May 2012)Citation: Barnboken tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 35, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/clr.v35i0.18081

Wrestling with Religion: Pullman, Pratchett, and the Uses of Story

This essay examines the role of religion in two recent fantasy series, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Terry Pratchett’s four Tiffany Aching books. Both series engage with religion as a cultural force, taking seriously the threat posed by unquestioning belief in the unseen, in a truth beyond knowing expressed especially in religious texts. Drawing on feminist and narrative theologies, the essay argues that despite Pullman’s public atheism, his methods in the trilogy ironically revitalize the very myths the series overtly works to discredit; but Pratchett’s series, by working outside the constraints of religious language and overtly religious (especially Christian) narrative, more subtly empowers his heroine to wrestle successfully with religion itself.

“Nothing Like Pretend”: Difference, Disorder, and Dystopia in The Multiple World Spaces of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

This article examines the multiple worlds in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in light Pierre Bourdieu’s “space of possibles” and the combination of chance and choice that impact Lyra and Will’s decisions. Rather than viewing chance or destiny as disempowering, this article considers how the protagonists’ choices also encourage readers to confront their own notions of space in the world outside the narrative. As Lyra and Will work to escape and restore the dystopic multiverses through which they travel, Pullman’s text challenges readers to recognize and repair the dystopias in their own worlds and to accept the Keatsian “negative capabilities” of ambiguity and mystery in place of facile escape. Given this pedagogical imperative, Pullman’s enclosure of Lyra and Will in their separate worlds lies at the heart of his resistance to escapist tendencies of fairy-tale endings. Fantasy must be grounded in reality because Pullman’s readers must also continue the struggle for wisdom in their own worlds no less than Lyra and Will.

Representations of Eastern Europe in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Jonathan Stroud's The Bartimaeus Trilogy, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series

This essay examines the cultural maps of Eastern European nations drawn by Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials trilogy, Jonathan Stroud in The Bartimaeus Trilogy and J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. I argue that each of those authors, in subtle and unintentional ways, perpetuates Western politico-cultural superiority in regard to Eastern Europeans. One reason for this may be that Pullman, Stroud and Rowling share a specifically British cultural attitude of regarding the continent as alien and incomprehensible. This perspective is part of a fuzzy cluster of notions, seemingly widespread across Europe, which comprise what Lawrence J. Sharpe calls ‘an East-West continuum of cultural one-upmanship’ (309). As the most westerly people on this continuum, so the explanation goes, the British tend to look down on everyone else to the East. My focus in this article is on how these attitudes are communicated in some of the most internationally popular British fantasy series of the recent years.