In “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), Northrop Frye famously distinguished “casual value-judgements,” which belonged “not to criticism but to the history of taste,” from their opposite, based on “literary experience.”[1] In making the distinction, Frye sought to solve a problem that bedeviled literary studies from its inception: “literature” can be used descriptively, but it also has a normative dimension. Crucial though these normative dimensions were to the foundation of English as an academic discipline, they fit uneasily with the scientific project of the modern university. For literary studies to become a Wissenschaft, it needed to shed value judgments. Normative claims about what we should read, about which texts are worth attending to and which are not, depend on value judgments. Frye’s solution to this problem was to embed those value judgments within the objects themselves, thus giving the impression that, while the objectivity of the sciences might remain unattainable, something similar was at least possible in literary studies, given the right choice of object approached in the right way.
Succeeding years saw growing suspicion of this solution. Both the “literary” and the “aesthetic” descended from sources of value into ideologies demanding critique. At the same time, value judgments did not go away: new values—chiefly political ones—took the place of the old. And it’s clear to even the casual observer of academic life that value judgments remain integral to the profession. No project with a political, ethical, or aesthetic dimension is value-free, nor is any historicism, this despite the fact that the specific value judgments informing the norms of the early profession are largely disputed, if not rejected. Indeed, the very act of deciding on a research project or a syllabus presupposes a judgment that the project or the texts under consideration are significant in some way, for some reason, and that this significance is valuable, in a way that another project or texts would not be. Thus many literary scholars might be said to live a kind of bad faith: we make our value judgments in the relative privacy of our syllabi or our classrooms, while paying public lip service to the idea that such judgments should be, as a rule, demystified. Or we seek to escape this bad faith by grounding our projects in extra-literary, nonaesthetic values that enjoy broad currency (like social justice), only to run into the inevitable problem of why our chosen objects are the best way to understand or illuminate those values (and not, say, theories of justice themselves).
Michael Clune’s A Defense of Judgment takes aim at this bad faith and its alibis, and it does so by attempting to revivify a version of what Frye called “literary experience” as the basis on which judgments of value can be made. His timing is propitious: the scholarly landscape is more favorable to the aesthetic than it has been in decades. Nevertheless, Clune, a literary scholar who is also the author of two compelling memoirs, begins with an apparent paradox: although recent scholarly work has restored “the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts” (9), that same work has steadfastly refused to endorse aesthetic judgment, the idea that a work “has value, not just for me but for everyone” (1). This refusal incurs institutional and intellectual costs. Institutionally, it “paralyzes our capacity to defend our discipline when it is threatened on many fronts” (1–2). Absent an embrace of value judgments, we lack a tool to persuade students to take our courses, and to justify them to university administrators and the wider public. Intellectually, an absence of aesthetic judgment blocks our ability to articulate how the study of literature contributes to the project of knowledge production in unique ways, ways that cannot be replaced by other disciplines. (We could always give up on the project of knowledge production, but this would naturally raise the question of why we belonged in the university in the first place.) The solution to the institutional and intellectual problems facing the discipline is not less value judgment but more.
This seems like a contradiction. But it fits with Clune’s larger ambition—one even grander than the rehabilitation of judgment—to reorient the profession around the eighteenth-century idea of aesthetic education, not for the reactionary purposes of cultural nostalgia and stasis but for purposes of collective emancipation. Of course, there can be no aesthetic education without a notion of the aesthetic, and Clune, beyond polemicizing with relish against the bad faith of his colleagues, seeks to make his contribution to the ongoing revival of aesthetic thinking. For him, aesthetic education will not concern classical judgments of beauty or sublimity, nor a connection between those concepts and freedom, as in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). There will be none of the appeals to play, the will, the emotions, intuition, pleasure, form, or depth psychology that dominated aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor will this aesthetic education depend on what Sianne Ngai described, in Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), as the concepts allowing us to make the most sense of how our “aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism”: the zany, the cute, and the interesting.[2] Rather, Clune eventually directs us away from aesthetic concepts proper and toward “the astonishing conceptual dynamism” (5) of literature, its capacity to make and articulate new ideas.[3]
His is an intellectualist approach, leavened with a dash of instrumentality and motivated by egalitarianism. Against the logic of a commercial culture in which “consumer preference is the sole standard of value,” aesthetic education resists “market totalitarianism” by “teaching students to transcend preference” and to see the general value of literary ideas (3–4). This education advances the cause of “aesthetic democracy” by widening the means to appreciate art beyond the purview of those whose expensive educations have already equipped them for it. To conduct this aesthetic education, however, we need to know which literature to pay attention to and how to pay attention to it. The problem, according to Clune, is that revivifying the practice of judgment runs afoul of a competing value that has not gone underground in the academy: equality. In distinguishing what is worthy of our attention from what is less worthy, aesthetic judgment rejects equality. It promotes and establishes hierarchies. Such hierarchies are suspicious because they exclude, and they are illegitimate when they exclude on no rational basis. Since taste would appear to lack a rational basis, telling someone that they should (to take one of Clune’s examples) prefer Madame Bovary to The Apprentice would be illegitimate, an act of social domination.
To defend judgment against the claims of what he calls “dogmatic equality,” Clune has to give it a legitimate basis, and he does this by appealing to another artifact of the eighteenth century, David Hume’s essay “On the Standard of Taste.” The appeal to a standard, and to literary intellectuals as bearers of it, guides four theoretical chapters: on the difference between judgment and equality, on the rise of commercial culture and its effect on judgment, and twinned chapters on how experts judge works of art. These theoretical chapters engage, briefly and pugnaciously (if also, on occasion, superficially), with major work on or around aesthetics by Jacques Rancière, John Guillory, Christopher North, Ngai, Richard Moran, Mark Edmundson, David Bromwich, Rita Felski, and Caroline Levine. Three case studies then put Clune’s theory into action, in which he models his own expert judgment on texts by Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The book ends with a slim conclusion praising aesthetic judgment—not, as is traditionally thought and as the book sometimes appears to endorse, as a kind of verdict rendered on a work, but rather as a skill that allows us to disclose values, to make clear what matters to us and why. In restoring aesthetic judgment as part of a larger effort to promote aesthetic education, Clune looks to contemporary literary scholars to transform an evaluative project into a hermeneutic and pedagogical one.
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Many readers of Clune’s book will be vexed by what he has to say about equality, in particular his claim that a “dogmatic equality” in aesthetic matters undermines the profession’s capacity to defend itself. The threats to the profession are many, and changing how we think about aesthetic judgment will not, in and of itself, neutralize them. At best, a more robust account of the relationship between the study of literature and knowledge production will give some of us more confidence in our place within the University, and, maybe, a leg up in our dealings with skeptical colleagues in other disciplines. But it’s far from clear that this confidence will have any real consequences for the profession as a whole.
Nevertheless, by insisting on the distinction between aesthetic judgment and equality—or, to put it a little less tendentiously, the conflict between what we think is good and what we like—Clune reminds us of something real and important that contemporary literary culture often obscures. If I can’t make a meaningful distinction between aesthetic judgment and personal preference, both my knowledge and my experience stand to be greatly limited; I could never appreciate something that I did not already like, and I would have to like everything that I thought was good. (Sadly, we can’t all be George Eliot scholars.) The trouble, of course, is that the reality of the distinction between what’s good and what we like seems to collapse when we acknowledge that aesthetic judgments are subjective. And, although it is couched in polemical terms, the first half of A Defense of Judgment is philosophically minded. It understands that because literature has a normative dimension, those norms need to come from somewhere. If those norms are going to be aesthetic (rather than ethical or political), they will need some aesthetic basis. Even if you are, like Ngai, a Hegelian, who sees in art the sensuous expression of the idea, and a Marxist, who finds that the idea is basically the distortions of social life wrought by capital, you are still left with deciding which works of art are the best examples of this process, and with explaining why this is so—a problem that Ngai, to her credit, acknowledges in a footnote.[4]
Some problems arise, however, when we look carefully at how Clune expects us to arrive at these norms. Although Hume is supposedly the guiding spirit of the book, there is another critic whose presence, though unmentioned, illuminates an argumentative sleight of hand at its heart. Early in his Defense Clune explains that the absence of judgment thus doesn’t just make our lives harder as teachers and scholars. It also impoverishes collective life, by restricting “the creation and dissemination of alternative concepts, perceptions, and experiences” and preventing us from “carving out a space beyond the reach of market valuation” (3). These phrases uncannily echo an earlier defense of judgment, also written against the expanding reach of market valuation—or, as it was called then, “philistinism.” In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” (1865) Matthew Arnold famously claimed that criticism needed to attain “disinterestedness” in order to “learn and propagate the best that is known and thought of in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.”[5] With respect to its interest in justifying our attention to works of art, its commitment to the act of judgment, and its investment in ideas as the ultimate point of our so judging, Clune’s book is thoroughly Arnoldian (without, I would add, appearing to be conscious of this fact). And, while there is nothing that would disallow returning to Arnold’s approach to criticism per se—nothing any more problematic than Arnold’s own cultural politics, which are, from our point of view, probably less objectionable than Hume’s—it does mean we inherit problems he did not solve. Like, for example, disinterestedness.
No concept from the history of modern aesthetics has been as thoroughly undermined or rejected as the concept of disinterestedness, whether that concept is Arnold’s, where “we keep aloof from the practical view of things,” enabling us to see an object the way it “really” is, or Kant’s, where it separates disinterested judgments of taste from interested judgments of other sorts.[6] To reactivate a position in which judgment will produce “alternative concepts, perceptions, and experiences” that will enrich collective life, judgments that will be assented to by everybody, Clune has to rehabilitate the idea of disinterestedness, or find a substitute for it (3). He does the latter by reaching beyond its Kantian foundations to Hume and the standard of taste. Indeed, he sees Hume as preferable to Kant, because, instead of a disinterestedness that would strip away “a subject’s experiential ties to the object, Hume emphasizes education, the adequate background of knowledge, practice, and experience possessed by ‘the best critics’” (21).
The issue, of course, is that this “best,” like the standard of taste in general, is vulnerable to precisely the same sorts of objections that disinterestedness is. Here we see that the return to Hume, which Clune explains in terms of an emphasis on education, on teaching people how to appreciate art, allows him to sidestep a major problem in the history of aesthetics that Arnold’s reliance on the concept had thrown into high relief. Indeed, it seems that Clune, in writing a defense of aesthetic judgment against what he takes to be the insidious creep of commercial culture and our feckless capitulation to it, has misrecognized his true antagonist. Dogmatic equality in aesthetic matters may fit the rise of the market economy like a glove, but this dogma is a reaction to an independent problem, which is skepticism about the justification of aesthetic judgments as such. Clune claims that this skepticism “arises with market culture,” and certainly the canonical disputes about taste, and the concept of the aesthetic itself, belong to a history of modernity that is bound up with the emergence of the market economy (though as de gustibus non est disputandum hints, maybe, to a longer history) (2). But the problem of a subjective judgment that solicits universal assent, and the skepticism that this judgment invites, are logically independent from the market. Certainly, the stakes of aesthetic disagreement would be different after the Revolution, but it is not as if those disagreements would be easier to resolve.
Hume, in appealing to the standard of taste, did not really address this skepticism attending aesthetic judgment so much as try to avoid it. While we cannot definitively prove our aesthetic judgments are true, we can rely on a combination of common sense, and the judgments of the learned, to guide us; we follow the examples of their judgments, come to see them as basically right, and the standard of taste is maintained. Nevertheless, once you acknowledge that disinterested judgment in aesthetic matters is not possible, that no one, not even the best and most insightful critics, can avoid prejudice, the authority of the knowledgeable becomes a less compelling justification of collective assent. Indeed, one might become sufficiently skeptical of this authority to see it as basically fraudulent, a mask for some more fundamental truth and arrive, ultimately, at the position of someone like the Bourdieu of Distinction, where aesthetic judgment becomes an expression of social position and a tool for domination. Even if, contra Bourdieu, we decide to accept the judgment of the critic as far as it goes, it will not be on their authority, or the authority of some generally accepted aesthetic law. It will be because they have given us something that we can effectively test against ourselves.
Clune, like many contemporary writers on aesthetics (and maybe even the later Bourdieu himself), rejects the schematism of Distinction, siding with Rancière on the potential capacity of the artwork to suspend the logic of the market. But while he seeks to legitimate the authority of the critic—something that Rancière, for example, takes for granted—his failure to address disinterestedness ultimately leads to a thin account of how this authority might be established, particularly given how subjective aesthetic judgments can be. Inspired by Hume’s remark in “On the Standard of Taste” that “Many men, when left to themselves, have but a faint and dubious perception of beauty, who yet are capable of relishing any fine stroke, which is pointed out to them,” Clune writes: “We accept those most knowledgeable and experienced in the arts as our guides because they can show us features of the work we’re currently unable to see” (19).[7] Absent from this model of the critic as helpful guide is any sense of the difficulty inherent in seeing and communicating the “fine stroke” as a “fine stroke” in the first place. The critic has to have taste, and they have to be able to express their judgment in a convincing way to someone else—someone who has, it needs be stressed, no necessary obligation to defer to them. But they also have to respect the fact that the subjectivity of their own judgment, and of their audiences, can never be overcome. Stanley Cavell emphasizes this predicament in his great essay “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.” For Cavell, the critic’s task is not “to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways.”[8] Appealing to a standard of taste might be a way to “master” this subjectivity, but it just as easily might be a way of denying it, of refusing to deal with the challenge of the viewer or the reader’s autonomy (not to mention the critic’s).
There is a further problem with Clune’s appeal to Hume beyond his attempt to avoid the problem of disinterestedness. What does it even mean to be “knowledgeable and experienced in the arts”? Certainly, the arts have changed since Hume’s time. Literature is a broader and deeper territory in terms of languages and cultures, and it’s also a territory in which crises, first of representation and then of reproducibility, have fundamentally challenged our conception of what an artwork is. As Clune admits, the best critics nowadays will need to be knowledgeable in ways that Hume and his contemporaries could not imagine. To defend, implicitly, against the charge of interested judgment, and, explicitly, against the charge of myopically importing eighteenth-century notions into the twenty-first century, Clune boldly casts the profession of literary studies itself in the role of Hume’s taste makers: “The qualities and backgrounds of Hume’s ‘best critics’ may now be understood in terms of the academic training of aesthetic experts” (66). In the early days of the profession, literary scholars worked within a larger “ecology of judgment” that included professional and amateur critics, editors, publishers, curators, etc., that separated the literary wheat from the chaff; this was one way that scholars could pretend to value-neutrality. Now, with that ecology withering, it’s up to us. After all, we’re experts in literature. Shouldn’t we be the best people to judge it? Don’t we also have the right experience?
It grieves me to say: not necessarily. Most literary scholars are not, in fact, “aesthetic experts” in the way that professional and amateur critics are (as those professional and amateur critics have, I think it is fair to say, not exactly tired of noting). We are, for the most part, interpreters and historians of literary periods, with the occasional theorist or practitioner of cultural studies or expert in material culture thrown into the mix. Clune can treat the profession as a source of aesthetic expertise only because, as he explains in his fourth chapter, he collapses aesthetics into hermeneutics, and aesthetic judgment into interpretation. There’s obviously something to this, particularly from the vantage point of producing knowledge. Judgment as such is crucial for any cognitive work, even for something as basic as recognizing a resemblance. And all sorts of preconditions need to be in place such that we can make judgments at all. But the rub here is that we’re not talking about judgment as such but judgment with respect to works of art.
The whole point of aesthetic judgments, as a category, is that they are distinct from other judgments, such that, if you want to move from aesthetic judgment to interpretation, you need to change your account of what you are doing. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer does, for example, in a much more thorough way than Clune, at the end of the first chapter of Truth and Method, when he criticizes the inability of “the experience of art” to “present the full truth of what it experiences in terms of definitive knowledge.”[9] Moving from aesthetic or literary judgment to interpretation is vital for us as scholars. But it is not a vital move for the critic. And the move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. Indeed, the crucial role of criticism for scholarship is not that it interprets, but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting. The essential sorting function of the “ecology of judgment” is valuable for, but also independent of, the scholarly project of interpretation. That independence is part of a long tradition: the great literary critics of the past (Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold) were not, primarily, interpreters of texts, and this remains the case among the major literary critics of the twentieth century (Eliot, Wilson, Trilling, Barthes, Hardwick, Sontag, etc.). What those critics were, often enough, were writers whose critical faculties grew out of, or alongside, literary ambitions. The object of their desire was art, not knowledge.
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Clune may not worry about eliding judgment and interpretation because, as a writer and scholar, he’s proficient at both in a way that many of his colleagues are not. More likely he’s attempting to bridge the gap between art and knowledge in a way that will seem defensible to other intellectuals. It’s also possible that, given the rise of The Program Era and the absorption of so much of the “ecology of judgment” into the University, the distance between aesthetic judgment and knowledge production has in fact changed, and the norms of artmaking and the norms of knowledge production are closer than ever before. If either of the latter possibilities are true, however, they only ramify a fundamental problem with the appeal to the standard of taste and to professors of literature as its modern successors, which is that they are all ill-equipped to see the merits of work that does not conform to the standard.
Deeply impressed by Michael Polanyi’s account of expertise in The Tacit Dimension (1966), Clune is altogether too confident that expert practice itself “provides a means for overcoming the barriers that prejudice, tradition, and complacency always present to new ideas, new forms, new traditions” (74). What’s needed is not merely expertise, but a challenge to the conventions (or the ideology) that literary expertise upholds. It’s something of a historical accident that the discipline of English was born out of critics’ attempt to grapple with T. S. Eliot’s post-Symbolist poetry, and that the academic-aesthetic standard could be said to accommodate “difficult” work. But just as Eliot’s early poetry was produced against the standard of taste he found, subsequent vanguardist work was too. While some of it has ended up in some classrooms, that’s only because of its being embraced and championed by other writers. Even if literature has, for complicated historical reasons, taken a tenuous and incomplete refuge from the market in the University, that doesn’t mean that literary values are necessarily the same as scholarly ones. Making scholars into the arbiters of taste limits our sense of what writers can and should do, no matter how broad-minded and broadly read those scholars are. An academic standard of taste will not appeal to every palate.
Such a limitation isn’t totally surprising or even problematic, given how narrowly directed toward the profession of literary studies A Defense of Judgment is. The book is not a defense of “literature,” but, in a sense, a defense of a defense of literature. (Eliot on Arnold: “rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic.”)[10] But watching the scholarly standard of taste in action in Clune’s three chapters of practical criticism, which are a curious and uneven mélange, does not inspire total confidence in his project. Methodologically, the chapters mean to support Clune’s brief in favor of judgment-as-interpretation. Substantively, they each contribute to the overarching claim of the book, which is that we should embrace judgment-as-interpretation with respect to literary texts because it allows us to see the valuable ideas therein. “Literature is full of the most astonishing ideas on every imaginable topic,” he writes, continuing in a disarming but also revealing passage: “I sometimes think of literature in the way scientists working on new medications think of the rain forest: the chances are that the next great idea—of philosophy, economics, history, neuroscience, or political science—lies buried somewhere in the literature section of the library” (104–106).
Each of the chapters tries to make good on this search for great ideas. Clune begins with questions, the answers to which will help us see those ideas in texts: “What does literature know and how does it know it?” (Dickinson and Keats) (111); “What would a commitment to art that has passed through the postmodern critique of art look like?” (Thomas Bernhard, with a dash of Beckett) (131); “What would we see in a world where race had become invisible?” (Gwendolyn Brooks) (153). It’s striking that these questions touch on such different areas of inquiry. The first is primarily epistemic, the second aesthetic and historical, the third social and political. But it’s even more striking that they all begin with “what,” rather than the ubiquitous “how” or the rarer but riskier “why.” The chapters seek to identify something rather than explain or analyze or justify it, which is consistent with Clune’s larger commitment to idea-generation as the crucial function of literature, and his corollary notion that aesthetic education is, ultimately, a matter of coming to see these ideas in texts. Whether or not the ideas in question are interesting or useful or have significant consequences is of course another question, and an important one. The analogy to the scientists combing the rainforest for new medications is suggestive but problematic: the stakes of those investigations are obvious in ways that the stakes of Clune’s are not. What is the payoff for thinking about what literature knows, or what a commitment to art that had internalized postmodern critique looks like, or what we would see in a world where race had become invisible? Does learning the answers to these questions really contribute to the grand project of showing our students how to live, as Clune claims choosing judgment over equality allows us to do?
The questions, and Clune’s commitments, are also notable because they run against what remains of a formalist grain in the profession. He is unsparing on formalism—or at least his portrayal of it—which he blames for blocking literature from having “extraliterary significance” and thus preventing it from yielding “exportable ideas” it needs to engage with “the wider world of knowledge and action” (104). A subtext of the book, one that deserved more attention, is that literature should not abjure instrumental reason but make peace with it. Certainly, formalism has not always helped its cause here, perhaps the most notorious example being Mallarmé’s reply to Degas that poems were made out of words, not ideas. (Never mind the fact that Mallarmé himself had a surfeit of ideas that informed his poems.) The spirit of this reply shouldn’t be seen as the either/or it’s been made out to be by a century of vanguardist experiment and its complicated embrace by (and of) French poststructuralism. Words are words, not just sounds, because they have meanings, and if they have meanings then we can talk about the ideas they express. Nevertheless, an insistence on words retains the real virtue of all literary formalism: keeping the object steadily in view. If a bad formalism refuses to acknowledge the importance of ideas, then a good formalism allows for the interplay of attention to the object and whatever ideas we find significant in it. And there is a need for good formalism, because the risk in prioritizing literary or artistic ideas is that they float away from the artwork. (I don’t blame ideas for this. It’s inconvenient to be bound.)
Clune’s idea-oriented readings manage this risk in different ways and with differing degrees of success. The Bernhard chapter is plainly the best of the three. Here Clune’s own prose comes alive, perhaps due to an affinity between author and critic—Bernhard’s sensibility appeals to Clune, who often plays the contrarian with dyspeptic glee—or because the question he asks of Bernhard, “What would a commitment to art that has passed through the postmodern critique of art look like?” is the most relevant to his own intellectual and artistic formation. The answer to this question is a brilliant inversion: whereas a social critic like Bourdieu “wants to jettison the ideal of the aesthetic as disinterested attention to form… Bernhard, with a deep understanding of how art has been infected by the social relations described by postmodern critics, reacts more rationally. Don’t get rid of art; get rid of social relations” (133). His work distinguishes itself by following this critique to its logical conclusion, in which “the ‘real satisfaction’ of art can never be achieved by the audience of a work but only and solely by its creator” (133). It helps the chapter that Bernhard is a philosophical novelist and a satirist, and an approach to his work that prioritizes ideas is more or less the approach that a philosophical novel or a satire calls for. But above all, the chapter works because Clune practices what he preaches, finding his ideas clearly expressed in the object under discussion. If it is hard to see what is aesthetic about this aesthetic education, apart from the fact that it refers to a novel, the education it offers nevertheless seems legitimate, and legitimately provocative, with respect to its source.
This is not the case, however, in the chapter on Dickinson and Keats. Here Clune answers the very question that animated the “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry—i.e., what does literature know, and how does it know it?—by claiming that literature sheds light on some of the most profound mysteries of all: what it is like to die, and how one might come to desire death. These are the topics that Clune takes Dickinson and Keats to explore, in “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” respectively. Putting aside the fact that literature might know many different things in many different ways, what Clune comes up with in both cases is intriguing. But his insistence that each of the poems approaches death by representing an “experience of absorbed listening,” one in which the self is extinguished, is supported by a dubious reading of the Dickinson poem, an overly literal approach to the Keats, and a reliance, throughout, on a philosophy of self culled from Hume and Parfit that he treats as self-evidently true.
Indeed, the contrast between his wholesale embrace of the philosophy, and his selective approach to the poems, makes it seem as if these poems have been dragooned into serving as examples of something else the critic has found interesting. Which isn’t to say that the ideas aren’t interesting, only that the art is inessential to their expression. Rather than the poems discovering something about the self, Clune has discovered something philosophers said about the self, something he thinks is correct, and that, if he squints hard enough, he can find in the poems. This is not really a strong defense of the cognitive power of literature, or of good judgment, so much as it is a display of the critic’s own ingenuity at finding evidence for ideas he likes. A stronger defense would show a tighter relation between literary texts and conceptual problems (as Clune’s own chapter on Bernhard does), while also connecting those conceptual problems to general debates in which others are participating.
A Defense of Judgment is not wrong to celebrate the restoration of the aesthetic, nor is it wrong to insist that such a celebration risks incoherence if it fails to accept an idea of aesthetic judgment. On these preliminary matters Clune is basically right. And, in a way that much academic criticism is not, it is refreshingly alive to the necessity of helping people learn how to appreciate works of art. This is a good thing. But it underscores the fact that, if the book had been written as a defense of literary appreciation, rather than judgment, it would have been more successful. Ultimately, the problems presented by aesthetic judgment are thornier than Clune gives them credit for being. His proposal to revive aesthetic education by appealing to the standard of taste, his limited sense of the challenges presented by this project, and his examples of practical criticism don’t, on the whole, solve those problems. If it is going to be motivated by aesthetic concerns, criticism needs to confront, not sidestep, the problem of its own legitimacy; it needs to encompass the range of aesthetic, not just interpretive, responses that are available to readers and audiences; and it needs to recognize the artwork as integral to those responses, not as an accidental site where they happen to take place.
Notes:
[1] Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature,” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1951): 94.
[2] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.
[3] There’s a superficial overlap between Ngai’s notion of the “interesting” and Clune’s “conceptual dynamism,” but whereas Ngai is referring to a judgment that never fully ceases to activate the free play of the cognitive faculties, Clune sees fully realized concepts that can be lifted out of literary texts and used in trying to understand the world.
[4] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 261 n. 168.
[5] Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism (London; Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865), 37.
[6] Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism,” 18.
[7] David Hume, Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), 239.
[8] Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94.
[9] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 90.
[10] T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1921), 1.