refreshing and thought provoking!

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S.Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a reader, I found this book refreshing and thought provoking! It presented a new (to me) view of how to read, of how to receive literature. I am looking forward to re-reading this book as part of my CS Lewis book club this semester.

Below are a few excepts from the Epilogue:

"Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox: 'he that loseth his life shall save it'. "

"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 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."

C.S. Lewis - "An Experiment in Criticism" - p. 138,141

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