Why the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy is an Important Lit Choice

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1. Liz says

   June 6, 2022 at 4:37 pm

   I’m teaching these books to a small group of homeschoolers in the next school year. My interest in your study guides is somewhat tempered by the fact that you mentioned eldilla as if they were the third type of Malacandrian (the actual third type was the pftfltriggi, the eldila are found in places other than Malacandria). It makes me wonder just how deeply you’ve actually read the books, and whether I’d be better off crafting my own questions based on lit crit in books like: Planets In Peril, Deeper Heaven, and Narnia and The Fields of Arbol. I was looking for truly thoughtful questions, and real insight into what Lewis is doing in the books. While he was certainly working to get Christian ideas past sleeping lions, and he certainly took the philosophical ideas expressed in The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image and wove them into a fictional narrative, these books are much richer than just a tract. I’m really wondering the extent to which your study guides go into the extensive reading that Lewis himself did which is reflected in the Ransom trilogy. For example, do you make it clear that Bernardus Silvestris was a real author whose ideas actually do partly inform Lewis’s thought? Do you discuss how Lewis took the idea of a science fiction type book with a religious philosophical message from an author whose philosophy he vehemently disagreed with? Do you go into the nature of the eldila? Do you discuss the issues of cosmology? Those are the kinds of subjects that I’m hoping to find study guides addressing. Do you pose thoughtful questions about the role of memory in pleasure? Do you even address the ways in which Lewis draws on earlier authors like Swift (whom my students and I read some of last year), Milton, and Dante? Do you look specifically at Lewis’s careful choice of words? These are books of such richness that scholars are mining new things from them all the time. I would hate to have them simply turned into books that kids viewed as the same kind of twaddle they would find in some moralistic story they would find in certain homeschool curricular anthologies. I have a deep love for Lewis’s work, and his works along with those of Tolkien, and to a lesser degree Stephen Lawhead helped to shape my own children’s world view. I would hate to use study questions that really interfere with the students’ just plain enjoyment of the books. I believe in the use of background material (and Lewis took the medieval view that borrowing from other authors was perfectly acceptable) and I would expect a study guide author to be aware of some of the reading Lewis did which informed these books. In addition, while I certainly hope that my students will draw moral, theological, and other lessons from the books I would hate to use study questions that simply force a particular conclusion. I think perhaps in my career as a 20+ year homeschooling mom, and a literature teacher of homeschooled students for nearly another two decades, I have more than once too often come across study guides that diminished rather than enhanced the experience of the reader. I an now really cautious about buying a “pig in a poke.” I am asking these questions because there is no possibility of viewing a sample of your study guide on Kindle, nor do you offer any sample selections here. I’m really looking for a thoughtful study guide written by someone who really knows their way around Lewis’s work, not simply a study guide with “reading comprehension” type questions written by someone who has merely read through the books once themself. I certainly can write my own study questions, I was simply hoping that there was a guide out there which had those kinds of thoughtful questions, and the title of this link made me think perhaps this was it.

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