A Defense of Judgment

If professors of literature have an expertise, it is in making judgments about value. They select works that deserve their students' attention because they are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, insightful. The intellectual coherence and social role of literary studies depend on the ability of literature professors to make such claims. Yet literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably grounded in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. 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. Literature professors' most basic challenge to aesthetic judgment is that it violates their commitment to equality. Clune argues that rejecting judgment on these grounds ratifies the market's monopoly on value and disables aesthetic education's political potential. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment. Moving from theory to practice, he takes up works by Emily Dickinson, John Keats, 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--