The purpose of this site:
During the summer of 2007, undergraduate researcher Melissa Glasscock and professor Dr. Doryjane Birrer collaborated on a literary research project based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The primary objective of the project was to collect, analyze, and synthesize a substantial body of primary and secondary materials that establish the ways in which Pullman’s trilogy can be read in the context of postmodern narrative theory: that is, in the context of Pullman’s explorations of the power of literary and cultural narratives and the discourses through which they are structured.
This website is meant to showcase some of the materials we read in our study of the His Dark Materials series. These materials, drawn from books, websites, essays, interviews and other sources, are organized thematically into the following categories:
Religion (resources that deal with the religious material of Pullman’s work and its controversial nature)
Education (resources aimed at educators for classroom use or discussing classroom use of HDM)
Literature (resources involving issues of genre or critical interpretation)
Film (resources about the production of the Golden Compass film)
Click on any of the above links to view information about these resources and my annotations. Sometimes the same resource will appear on multiple pages; the annotations will differ accordingly, based on which thematic category it is placed in at the time.
Project Abstract
Narrative is central to human experience and culture. As Simon Malpas puts it, “our understanding of the world is made up of the numerous different ways in which we discuss and experience it”(37). Narratives arising, for example, from the discourses of philosophy, religion, and science can support and sustain us while we imbue the stories of our lives with meaning; such narratives can also “overwrite” our thoughts and behaviors, constraining our critical thinking and compromising our human agency—our ability to make choices and act independently as responsible citizens. This project is fundamentally involved with the study of narrative in these contexts through the lens of English novelist Philip Pullman’s subversive postmodern fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000). In this project we analyzed how Pullman’s fictional narratives draw on, critique, and/or revise particular literary and cultural narratives in order to explore the power of narrative—for good and for ill—in shaping human experience.
For example, one cultural narrative that Pullman draws on extensively is the Christian parable of the Fall of Man, a story that has impacted Western civilization—and the entire world—in immeasurable ways, defining the way millions have envisioned the origins of humanity, the nature of sin, and humans’ place in the universe. Pullman specifically draws from John Milton’s account of the Fall in the epic poem Paradise Lost, in both content and atmosphere.