Defense of Judgment

Teachers?of literature make judgments about value.?They?tell?their?students?which?works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange,?or?insightful-and thus,?which?are more worthy of?time and attention than others. Yet?the field of literary studies?has?largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably?rooted?in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status.?For several decades now, professors have?called?their?work value-neutral,?simply?a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge.?Michael W. Clune's provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education.?It is impossible, Clune argues, to?separate?judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.?Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment,?transcending?consumer culture and market preferences.?Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of?knowledge and?perception,?Clune?advocates for?the cultivation of what?John?Keats called "e,negative capability,"e, the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt?and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks.?Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by?Keats,?Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading-the profession's traditional key skill-harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.