Can You Say “Shared Text”?

Try to understand that scoop from The Stanford Daily, The Pensieve: Harry Potter and the Stanford Bubble, without a thorough knowledge of all seven Potter books. The title, premise, and argument of the whole piece is that you, the reader, know Harry’s adventures so well that I, the writer, have to explain absolutely nothing about it. The Hogwarts Saga is the foundation

of the conversation, the cultural ‘given.’

Harry is the Shared Text of the 21st Century. I have a hard day imagining a faith community in the US discussing a topical issue with that many references to that faith’s scriptures with the kind of surety that that writer and The Stanford Daily editors have that their readers will get the allusions.