Literatura como logosuna lectura de An Experiment In Criticism de Clive Staples Lewis

Abstract

Clive Staples Lewis (1998-1963), writer, professor and literary critic, put forward in his 1961 essay An Experiment in Criticism a proposal for literary criticism that was novel at the time. In order to understand it, this work, which employs a qualitative and comparative methodology, with a descriptive approach focused on content, reviews and analyses his biography, his literary tastes, his writings and the evolution of his thought. From his childhood Lewis felt a "longing" to transcend phenomenal reality in order to reach the truth of things through art and spirituality. Hence, he considers fundamental the concept of imagination as an aesthetic but also a cognitive faculty which, through its connection with reason, allows access both to the aesthetic enjoyment of works of art and to their message. He argues that in the act of reading, the author, the text and the reader converge and puts forward the concept of "Literature as Logos". The author, inspired by the Logos, knowledge common to all humanity, transmits in the work a seed which, if the soil is propitious, will germinate in the spirit of the reader, giving rise to a generative process analogous to that which takes place in the physical nature of things. This was an innovative approach to literary criticism in its time and opened the way for subsequent literary criticism.