Author and Reader

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis demonstrates why, within traditional academic circles, he is best known and most respected for his accomplishments in regard to the study of English literature. Lewis’s important monograph aims to illuminate a new direction in literary criticism, and succeeds marvelously. Interestingly, Lewis’s analysis is paralleled at every turn by Polanyian insights. We have therefore yet a further instance of the intersection of the thought of these two men, and we again wonder at the absence during their lives of recognition of one another. What follows is a fragment of a much larger study that, circumstances permitting, might have been executed under the heading of “The Tacit Dynamics of Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism.” The present essay will confine itself to examination of one from a long list of pregnant themes that arise from a Polanyian encounter with Lewis’s important monograph, namely, the manner in which Michael Polanyi’s notions of “sense-giving” and “sense-reading” usefully illuminate both the concept of “good reading” that stands at the heart of Lewis’s book and the practice of literary criticism itself. We will begin by explaining what Lewis intends by “good reading.” Following that, we will review Polanyi’s sense-giving and sense-reading before, finally, indicating the role Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 45:1 © 2019 by the Polanyi Society 43 they may play in comprehending reading and criticism alike. In the process many of the themes of the now-dormant larger study will naturally appear.