Lewis as critic

Toward the close of Lundin’s book, he offers a number of intriguing criticisms of CS Lewis as a literary critic. He claims that while Lewis recognized the corrosive effects of the Enlightenment and Romantic conception of the self in his theological writings, he adopted a form of romanticism in his critical work, especially An Experiment in Criticism . His distinction in that work between “use” and “reception,” Lundin claims, is based on a post-Kantian ideal of disinterested aesthetic experience, and against this Lundin follows Gadamer in arguing that there is no bright line between interpretation and application, that there is never a reception that is not already some sort of use.