Taking a hybrid approach of research and narrative, theory and reflection, this essay utilizes yogic theory as a lens to discuss how students can negotiate one of the more challenging aspects of their research writing: freely setting out into the realm of creative, original research while negotiating genre-based constraints. I present research on genre and the “containment” of composition that highlights some of the past and current discussion about the potentially inhibiting heuristics that can shut down students’ constructions of agency and creativity in researched writing. Drawing upon research in contemplative pedagogy, essential texts of yogic philosophy, and images of the body in asana, I use the philosophy and language of yogic practice to propose a pedagogy that invites students to see their way toward an embodied practice of research, one that helps them to acknowledge and negotiate generic constraints, seek innovation, and accept uncertainty in their research-based writing.

From fundamentalist views that wish to ban the books for their use of magic, to perspectives that the books are a modern-day expression of good Christianity, controversy around the rhetorical implications of faith in Harry Potter has become critical to the culture of the book. With its focus on these questions of religious rhetoric in Rowling’s texts, this article centers specifically on the theological thread that runs through C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter series. Lewis’s deeply embedded use of the trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” — the question that haunts Narnia as Edmund plays the Judas to Aslan’s existence and resurrection — also winds its way through the unfolding plot of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s narrative, however, takes its own rhetorical path. Defying and confusing traditionally stark boundaries between good and evil, mortal and immortal, Harry Potter is not the tidy story of clear ideological divisions. Rather, Rowling’s use of Lewis’s trilemma serves to complicate and illustrate the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as the moral complexities of “good” and “evil,” in order to address an audience not necessarily Christian, but decidedly human.