Archive for February, 2009

27
Feb

What Happens to the Humanities During a Recession?

   Posted by: cslewisfoundation    in Arts and Culture, Higher Education

The New York Times recently asked this important question in the Books section of their online newspaper.  Here’s an excerpt:

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

For the full article, go to the New York Times Online Book Section.

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25
Feb

Book Review - The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia

   Posted by: Nan Rinella    in Arts and Culture, Books and Film

The Magician's Book

BOOK REVIEW

The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller

Little Brown: 320 pp., $25.99

By Nan Rinella

To anyone who loves C.S. Lewis and Narnia, The Magician’s Book presents a dichotomy between delight and disbelief. The critique/biography/author’s memoir is mesmerizing in its perspicacity, but mystifying from a Christian perspective.

Laura Miller is a literary critic who was raised a Catholic in the California desert and studied literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a cofounder of Salon.com and a contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She writes, “The process of writing about a book can reveal things you’d never get from simply reading it.” I can certainly relate, because reading Miller’s book and writing this review has been a labor of love to this student of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and an extraordinary journey that led to a surprising and startling discovery.

She admits that her rocky love affair with Narnia is one of enchantment, betrayal, estrangement, and reunion. For a long time after discovering the Christian overtones, Miller blocked out Narnia, but she could not help but eventually return, coming to terms with it. She claims, “What I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it.” But for all the countless times she has reread the books, they have never succeeded in converting her. She confesses though, that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will always be the best book she’s ever read because of how it made her feel. She admits, “If any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these, yet I didn’t budge.”

The title of The Magician’s Book comes not from The Magician’s Nephew, a tale of two children thrown into the birth of Narnia, but from the magician’s book that Lucy peeks in to find out its secrets in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Miller’s literary criticism begins with the memories of the author as a child of nine who “opened the hinged cover of a book”-like Lucy opening the door to the wardrobe-and stepped through it into another world. “Narnia,” she writes, “seemed to emerge, by some miracle, out of my unspoken self.” She told the teacher who gave her The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that she didn’t know that there were other people who had the kind of imagination that she did. And she wanted more, but was afraid to talk about it lest it go away.

In Miller’s opinion, “the made-up-ness of Narnia has always seemed particularly glaring to certain well-read adults who never encountered the books as children.” Not this adult. But then, I’m the grownup, who at age forty, cried when Christopher Robin said good-by to Winnie the Pooh, as I read The House at Pooh Corner to my two-year-old son.

As a reader who first visited all of Aslan’s magical land at sixty, I was enthralled with Miller’s childhood recollections. Because I missed that blissful thrill of reading these adventures as an innocent, I relished experiencing it second-hand. I enjoyed her exploration of the influence that first books have on children, and was intrigued by her supposition that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly.

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18
Feb

C.S. Lewis: Sixty Years of Letters - A Thematic Overview

   Posted by: Jessica Shaver Renshaw    in Arts and Culture, Books and Film

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volumes 1-3 (Harper San Francisco, 2004, 2004, 2007)

Reviewed by Jessica Shaver Renshaw

“I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way)…”

– C.S. Lewis, age 17, to Arthur Greeves, March 14, 1916

I’ve wondered what C.S. Lewis was like as a person.  He was a colossus as thinker and author, able to sever knots of intellectual and theological difficulty (and stuffiness) with insightful words, offering truth in clear, sensible, emotionally satisfying chunks.

I’ve often thought he would have been an intimidating man to hang out with.  He and his wife Joy played Scrabble in five languages, including Chaucerian English.  Lewis kept up a correspondence with an Italian priest in Latin, the only language they had in common.  Of the hundreds of books in his library, a visitor could pick one at random, start to read aloud any sentence - and listen to Lewis quote the rest by memory.

I couldn’t possibly match the breadth of his literary allusions, his powers of articulation.  And then there’s his early snobbery, when he felt that Americans and women were inferior beings.  I am both.  He preferred the camaraderie of men, especially accompanied by a pint in a smoke-filled pub.  He would have awed me and I would have bored him.

But by reading his letters, I can look over his shoulder as he writes.  I can stop him and say, “So that’s where you got the idea for Aslan.”  Or I can ramble contentedly with him on walking tours through England on winter mornings with mist as “tangible as treacle” or on summer evenings with golden light so “liquid” one can almost drink it.  Through his letters I can become his friend, without his even knowing I’m there.

C.S. (”Jack”) Lewis would have had no patience with what we are about to do: discuss his personal life.  “I have no natural curiosity about private lives,” he wrote to one friend and to another, “…we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us.”

In response to a request for “background information” from an American minister in 1948, the British author of The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote back, in a rare burst of pique, ‘Ought you, as a Pastor, to encourage the public demand for quite irrelevant facts about authors?… I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books shd. be ‘set in their biographical context’ and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare of Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works.”  In the same letter he declared, “…the only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say.”

But since, at 17, he was the first one to suggest publishing his letters and since in those letters he gives us glimpses of his private life, he might not mind our extracting from them what he had to say about himself. Read the rest of this entry »

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