How long does it take to read An Experiment in Criticism?
An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis takes about 2 hours 36 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 36 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1961. 142 pages, about 39,050 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 20 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 36 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 38 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Professor Lewis believed that literature exists above all for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He doubted the use of strictly evaluative criticism, especially its condemnations. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books, and 'bad taste' is thought of as a taste for bad books. Professor Lewis' experiment consists in reversing the process, and judging literature itself by the way men read it. He defined a good book as one which can be read in a certain way, a bad book as one which can only be read in another. He was therefore mainly preoccupied with the notion of good reading: and he showed that this, in its surrender to the work on which it is engaged, has something in common with love, with moral action, and with intellectual achievement. In good reading we should be concerned less in altering our own opinions than in entering fully into the opinions of others; "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself". As with all that Professor Lewis wrote, the arguments are stimulating and the examples apt"--Publisher description.
Subjects: Books and reading, Criticism, Théorie critique, Criticisme, Literary criticism, European
