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    An Experiment in Criticism
    An Experiment in Criticism
    An Experiment in Criticism
    Ebook134 pages2 hours

    An Experiment in Criticism

    By C. S. Lewis

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    Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis's classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues that "good reading," like moral action or religious experience, involves surrender to the work in hand and a process of entering fully into the opinions of others: "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself." Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind. Amid the complex welter of current critical theories, C. S. Lewis's wisdom is valuably down-to-earth, refreshing and stimulating in the questions it raises about the experience of reading.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 5, 2013
    ISBN9780062313713
    Author

    C. S. Lewis

    Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures. Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) fue uno de los intelectuales más importantes del siglo veinte y podría decirse que fue el escritor cristiano más influyente de su tiempo. Fue profesor particular de literatura inglesa y miembro de la junta de gobierno en la Universidad Oxford hasta 1954, cuando fue nombrado profesor de literatura medieval y renacentista en la Universidad Cambridge, cargo que desempeñó hasta que se jubiló. Sus contribuciones a la crítica literaria, literatura infantil, literatura fantástica y teología popular le trajeron fama y aclamación a nivel internacional. C. S. Lewis escribió más de treinta libros, lo cual le permitió alcanzar una enorme audiencia, y sus obras aún atraen a miles de nuevos lectores cada año. Sus más distinguidas y populares obras incluyen Las Crónicas de Narnia, Los Cuatro Amores, Cartas del Diablo a Su Sobrino y Mero Cristianismo.

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    Reviews for An Experiment in Criticism

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      C.S. Lewis and I are not the best match. I'm even in the small minority who don't appreciate the beloved Narnia books. He has a loopy excessive style which was very prevalent in this book. To me, it seems like the writing equivalent of thinking aloud. However in all that word salad, he did catch my attention a few times. I quite enjoyed his essay on Poetry. I also liked his thoughts on critical reading and the way certain books and authors come in and out of vogue over time. He asks the question, do we judge a book by the quality of it's reader, or a reader by the quality of the book? It's topsy turvey thinking but I've always been interested in what people are reading and why they love or hate it so these notions of what makes a good book are interesting to me. All said - I managed to take something away from this book despite struggling through much of it.
    • 5/5
      Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.In “An Experiment in Criticism” by C. S. LewisAnarcho-punk, extreme literature..... Beware the coming revolution.All the best writers are anarcho-punks:- JJ Rousseau: A Discourse On Inequality- Thomas Payne: The Rights Of Man- Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman- Victor Hugo 'Les Miserables' set in the French Revolution in Paris.Dostoevsky wrote his first novel 'The Poor Folk' aged 29. This resulted in him and his 3 co-radicals being sentenced to death by firing squad in the main public square in St Petersburg by the Tsar who was offended by their revolutionary contents. At the last second the Tsar commuted the punishment to 4 years hard labour in Siberia. Two of the writers went mad from this sadist act, but Dostoevsky kept on writing about being on death row, psychological torture, his time in jail and did so for the rest of his life. Orwell. 'Homage To Catalonia' set in Spanish Revolution in Barcelona where anarchists fight fascists.The close reading of novels (not, interestingly, poems, stories, plays or biographies/general non-fiction) has come up glancingly in similar pieces over the last two decades. It's easy to interpret it as resulting from a generalized cultural anxiety over the apparently luxurious (or frivolous) apportioning of several hours and days for contemplation of long-form fictitious narratives with no obvious social or 'self-improvement' benefits, at least none that can be vigorously attested to. Add that to an increasingly competitive cultural scene, where every new TV show from singing to putting up wallpaper takes the form of a contest, and you have this weird impetus to 'prove' the practical and moral worth of an essentially solitary pursuit by subjecting it to blatantly unaesthetic and unhelpful criteria, where a reader is essentially apologizing publicly for an activity that can never be made socially correct - it simply isn't in the nature of concentrated reading. While speed-reading as a technique has been overvalued by diagnosticians (time-maximisation combined with cultural chicken soup for the soul) and clearly has its roots in the alleviation of guilt rather than the apprehension of art, it does have a legitimate tether to breathlessly enthusiastic page-turning, where either personal enthusiasm or the “skimmable” nature of the writing itself encourages faster than usual reading. But novels are neither instruction manuals nor paper-bound substitutes for TV, and the speed and quality of attention implicitly demanded by them cannot conform to the expectations of demonstrable expediency demanded by extra-literary considerations. In short, I can't reasonably claim to another person that the reading of a novel over two or twenty hours of your valuable time is a socially defensible act, precisely because novel-reading falls deliberately outside such parameters. I do find myself doubting the legitimacy of the things I used to read, and having published poems for a few years in the last decade I include my own efforts. I hope neither were ‘all bullshit’ as I sometimes tell myself nor I think I'm just wrongly attuned right now. Maybe the machine in my hands at this moment in time is involved, or the heavy breakfast I didn't go near in my 20s.Back in the day I tended to read very fast, because I was a book glutton, i.e., I’d devour books. It can be great but it can also be a curse. A good book is over too quickly and I’d miss layers and complexity. I’d compensate by rereading books where I pick up things I missed on the first read. Grinding through exams at college left me with an overwhelming desire to get acres of really enjoyable fiction out of the public library and gorge on it until I had cleared my head of everything to do with the syllabus. For me, it's 'hearing' the words in my own inner voice, as if the sentences are being spoken out loud. If I skim over words, they're somehow lost. I've only got hold of the text in a generalised, floaty way. If I'm reading a classic and I begin to 'float', I realise that I'm 'reading without paying attention' in my inner voice and calm myself down so I can connect with each word. (Otherwise, what's the point of reading well-crafted text?). It's easy to skim across the surface. It's like pacing yourself for a marathon! Too fast and you'll get lactic burn and die. Too slow and you'll won't get momentum going. I start slow and build up my pace can be reading 60-80 pages a day in the main sections.After a meaty epic, like “Crime and Punishment” I’d purposely like to blast-read through something pulpy or non-fiction like an appetiser for the next course. It helps my mind relax and reboot so I do appreciate the benefits of reading quickly, for people who are mentally tired or maybe have less time have. A lot of modern literature embraces that reality.
    • 3/5

      I like the premise of this book. I like the idea that Lewis proposes here, that literature should not be measured by how it's written but how it's read. But I also thought his " experiment" idea could have been expressed more succinctly in an essay. Once again a lot of references Lewis uses went over my head. So unless you're very familiar w/British literature of the 1930's and before, most of the examples will be lost on you.



      Just picked this one up again. I still have my tattered copy from college days. I expect I'll get much more out of this now, 35 years later ☺
    • 4/5
      There are no good or bad books, only good and bad readers or perhaps more correctly good or bad reading methods. Even a "bad book" can be "read well". One shouldn't judge the work but rather how the reader receives and reads the work.
    • 4/5
      If you can get past Lewis's snooty attitude here (LW3 called him a "pompous poot" in the margin in the copy I just read), he has some rather interesting and important things to say about how we judge books. In a nutshell, he thinks that considering how a book is read would be a much better endeavor than trying to use taste to judge a book good or bad. If a book invites readers to read it in a "literary" way, the book is good. (Much of Lewis's book is taken up in discussing what he means by "literary"; one part of his definition is that literary readers experience or "receive" while reading rather than "using" what they read). A complex text very well worth reading and which resists easy summary. Perhaps the best summary is to say that Lewis spends the book trying to prove the statement he makes to close his argument: "But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."
    • 4/5
      This book was a formative influence in my approach to literature and reading.
    • 5/5
      I believe Lewis is right that readability ND rereadability form the basic criterion of literary value. My only reservation is his attempt to excludecertain popular books from this criterion on the grounds that they merely pander to selfish (often snobbish) desires. I think even in this category of writing, some books are more effective, and therefore more read and reread, than others.
    • 5/5
      A delightful short volume on literature. My favorite parts were the chapter on myth and the epilogue, along with the whole idea that literary criticism in its modern incarnation is dry, dull, and harmful to literature.

    Book preview

    An Experiment in Criticism - C. S. Lewis

    CHAPTER 1

    THE FEW AND THE MANY

    In this essay I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men’s reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.

    I think this worth trying because the normal procedure seems to me to involve almost continually a false implication. If we say that A likes (or has a taste for) the women’s magazines and B likes (or has a taste for) Dante, this sounds as if likes and taste have the same meaning when applied to both; as if there were a single activity, though the objects to which it is directed are different. But observation convinces me that this, at least usually, is untrue.

    Already in our schooldays some of us were making our first responses to good literature. Others, and these the majority, were reading, at school, The Captain, and, at home, short-lived novels from the circulating library. But it was apparent then that the majority did not ‘like’ their fare in the way we ‘liked’ ours. It is apparent still. The differences leap to the eye.

    In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s paper; they had already used it. Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

    Secondly, the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called ‘reading oneself to sleep’. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

    Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or the novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.

    Finally, and as a natural result of their different behaviour in reading, what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind of the few, but not to that of the many. The former mouth over their favourite lines and stanzas in solitude. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. They talk to one another about books, often and at length. The latter seldom think or talk of their reading.

    It is pretty clear that the majority, if they spoke without passion and were fully articulate, would not accuse us of liking the wrong books, but of making such a fuss about any books at all. We treat as a main ingredient in our well-being something which to them is marginal. Hence to say simply that they like one thing and we another is to leave out nearly the whole of the facts. If like is the correct word for what they do to books, some other word must be found for what we do. Or, conversely, if we like our kind of book we must not say that they like any book. If the few have ‘good taste’, then we may have to say that no such thing as ‘bad taste’ exists: for the inclination which the many have to their sort of reading is not the same thing and, if the word were univocally used, would not be called taste at all.

    Though I shall concern myself almost entirely with literature, it is worth noting that the same difference of attitude is displayed about the other arts and about natural beauty. Many people enjoy popular music in a way which is compatible with humming the tune, stamping in time, talking, and eating. And when the popular tune has once gone out of fashion they enjoy it no more. Those who enjoy Bach react quite differently. Some buy pictures because the walls ‘look so bare without them’; and after the pictures have been in the house for a week they become practically invisible to them. But there are a few who feed on a great picture for years. As regards nature, the majority ‘like a nice view as well as anyone’. They are not saying a word against it. But to make the landscapes a really important factor in, say, choosing the place for a holiday—to put them on a level with such serious considerations as a luxurious hotel, a good golf links, and a sunny climate—would seem to them affectation. To ‘go on’ about them like Wordsworth would be humbug.

    CHAPTER 2

    FALSE CHARACTERISATIONS

    It is, in the logical sense, an ‘accident’ that readers of the one kind are many and those of the other few, and the two kinds are not characterised by these numerical terms. Our business is with different ways of reading. Common observation has already enabled us to make a rough and ready description, but we must try to penetrate further. The first step is to eliminate some hasty identifications of the ‘few’ and the ‘many’.

    Some critics write of those who constitute the literary ‘many’ as if they belonged to the many in every respect, and indeed to the rabble. They accuse them of illiteracy, barbarism, ‘crass’, ‘crude’ and ‘stock’ responses which (it is suggested) must make them clumsy and insensitive in all the relations of life and render them a permanent danger to civilisation. It sometimes sounds as if the reading of ‘popular’ fiction involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience. I have a notion that these ‘many’ include certain people who are equal or superior to some of the few in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent. With the hasty and wholesale apartheid of those who ignore this we must have nothing to do.

    If it had no other defect it would still be too diagrammatic. The two sorts of readers are not cut off by immovable barriers. Individuals who once belonged to the many are converted and join the few. Others desert from the few to the many, as we often sadly discover on meeting an old schoolfellow. Those who are on the ‘popular’ level as regards one art may be deeply appreciative of another; musicians sometimes have deplorable preferences in poetry. And many whose responses to all the arts are trivial may yet be people of great intelligence, learning and subtlety.

    This latter phenomenon does not surprise us much because their learning is of a different sort from ours, and the subtlety of a philosopher or physicist is different from that of a literary person. What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort. They are mere professionals. Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. I am thinking of unfortunate scholars in foreign universities who cannot ‘hold down their jobs’ unless they repeatedly publish articles each of which must say, or seem to say, something new about some literary work; or of overworked reviewers, getting through novel after novel as quickly as they can, like a schoolboy doing his ‘prep’. For such people reading often becomes mere work. The text before them comes to exist not in its own right but simply as raw material; clay out of which they can complete their tale of bricks. Accordingly we often find that in their leisure hours they read, if at all, as the many read. I well remember the snub I once got from a man to whom, as we came away from an examiners’ meeting, I tactlessly mentioned a great poet on whom several candidates had written answers. His attitude (I’ve forgotten the words) might be expressed in the form ‘Good God, man, do you want to go on after hours? Didn’t you hear the hooter blow?’ For those who are reduced to this condition by economic necessity and overwork I have nothing but sympathy. Unfortunately, ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And, however it is produced, it destroys appreciation. The ‘few’ whom we are seeking cannot be identified with the cognoscenti. Neither Gigadibs nor Dryasdust is necessarily among them.

    Still less is the status seeker. As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion. They drop the Georgians and begin to admire

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