Over the next three years, I hope to write four literature courses for a Christian homeschool curriculum. I want this curriculum to be self-consciously Christian, built up on clear Biblical presuppositions. I can’t write this curriculum yet. This blog will record my experiments in Christian criticism as I prepare for this work.
The site’s name is an homage to C.S. Lewis’s excellent book, An Experiment in Criticism. In it, Lewis asserts that the real difference in literary experience comes not from the books one reads but from readers themselves. Lewis makes this point with wit and good taste and a joie de vivre that always makes me want to go and read more. I hope that my writing comes complete with that kind of joy, not just dry-as-dust instruction.
My plan for the blog is this:
MONDAYS: Work through the basic doctrines of scripture that literary study must acknowledge and be built upon. These posts will include reviews of and engagements with works of theology I am reading in this season of preparation.
TUESDAYS: Work through Christian responses to the terms found in the University of Chicago’s Critical Terms for Literary Study. There is no better source for seeing the ways in how keywords are defined by secular literary critics and providing a point-by-point contrast with Biblical presuppositions. I know I will probably ask more questions than I can answer, but I think this will give me a clear way to see how a committed Christian approach to literature differs from a secular one.
WEDNESDAYS: Work through the basic insights from general handbooks of literature written by both Christian and secular scholars.
THURSDAYS: Offer interpretations of works of narrative fiction: from Tolstoy to Tolkien. Here I will begin applying the insights I’ve made in the first three days to the interpretations of actual novels and short stories.
FRIDAYS: Offer interpretations of drama: everything from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Strindburg.
SATURDAYS: Offer interpretations of narrative and lyric poetry: from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Donne.
My goals for the literary criticism I write are to (A) glorify God and (B) more fully explain how literature provides a means of enjoying Him.
The standard defense of literature is that it instructs and delights. That’s certainly what scripture does. The best literature does it too, and literary criticism is more than a handmaiden in that work. If the best literature uses human imagination to participate in God’s redemption of the world, then literary criticism is the means by which the good news of that work is announced.
Experiments in Criticism 