Readers casually coming upon the title of Michael W. Clune's book, A Defense of Judgment (2021), might understandably assume that it will make a case for the legitimacy of evaluation in literary criticism, the process of weighing the artistic value of a literary work. However, this title proves to be misleading in more than one way: the book has little to say about how a critic might arrive at a valid judgment, and, in the end, the method that Clune advocates and ultimately models for us is not actually judgment at all.
Clune is interested in restoring what he calls judgment to a respectable place in academic literary study, although less as a strategy for the academic critic to use than as a foundation for a revived mission of "academic education" as the justification of literary study as a discipline. Clune wants literature professors to abandon their concession to the irremediable subjectivity of judgment as valuation and freely acknowledge that some literary works (works of art in general) are better than others, more worthy of students' attention. This would entail giving up on the dogmatic insistence on equality as the supreme value of an enlightened profession and admitting that academic expertise exists and should give the views of putative experts some additional weight. Literature professors, according to Clune, should be willing to enlist their expertise in an effort to teach their students how to appreciate the distinctive value of literature,
Clune's critique of the problem academic literary study has created for itself through the demotion of "literature itself" to a secondary status (secondary to theory, historical context, or cultural politics) is astute, and seems to me almost certainly correct. To avow that all responses to works of literature are equally valid is to deny the very basis on which literary study entered the academy in the first place--if the professors in this "field" have no special standing by which their views on it carry extra weight, then what's the purpose of the field and why specialize in it? Notwithstanding all of the appeals to theoretical or cultural knowledge to which literary academics have retreated while dispensing with aesthetic analysis or the explication of ideas (to cite Clune's favored object of study), the floundering around with one new approach after another over the last 40 years of academic literary study has surely left the discipline vulnerable to the kinds of depredations inflicted on it recently--from defunding to elimination of programs to attacks on its supposed left-wing biases--such that its future is now legitimately in question. Taking stock of the purpose of literary study is certainly in order.
The solution to these problems that Clune has in mind, which he illustrates in the second half of the book, might return literary instruction back to literature, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't actually involve judgment in any noticeable way. Clune offers readings of works by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Gwendolyn Brooks, apparently seeking in all of these cases the literary ideas they disclose--ideas that, we are to infer, can be discovered only through the kind of close scrutiny exemplified by Clune's analysis. The interpretations that emerge from this analysis are interesting and perceptive--Clune's contention that Bernhard's Woodcutters both accepts the "postmodern" critique of art as compromised by social relations and evades it by shedding the "social" altogether is particularly provocative--but they are interpretations. The only form of judgment at work is the initial judgment that this text is worth your attention, and the focus is almost exclusively on ferreting out the theme, the idea that Clune wants to make available to examination. If these readings are to contribute to aesthetic education, they would do so without much reference to the aesthetic as an existing property of literary works.
I am not suggesting that Clune ought to be advocating the use of the classroom as a space in which to pronounce literary judgments. I am perfectly content with interpretation as a classroom method of teaching literature, but at the least Clune's invocation of it makes these concluding chapters seem anticlimactic, the application of what turns out to be a familiar strategy in a book that initially promises a radical reorientation of a discipline desperately in need of occupational resuscitation. If Clune's method was adopted (which doesn't seem that likely), at least it would have the virtue of returning ostensible teachers of literature to literary qualities as the focus of instruction, but I don't see much evidence that today's cadre of literature professors has much interest in such a restoration. However, a reluctance to use the classroom as an opportunity to reinforce a particular judgment of quality in a literary work--lets all gather round and appreciate this text--is not inherently misguided.
Making judgments about quality is of course considered one of the appropriate goals of book reviewing, but even here, judgment is often applied. . .injudiciously. Most reviews offer value judgments, but the majority of them are blandly affirmative, as if the mere act of writing a novel or collecting a set of short stories is in itself a praiseworthy act, the substantive artistic achievement of the work notwithstanding. Many render their judgments, positive or negative, without much reference to the relevant qualities of the work that might validate the judgment, while others spend most of the allotted space summarizing, as if merely telling us what happens or identifying the characters should obviously demonstrate that the critic's verdict is justified. I myself spend a good deal of space in a review--most of it--describing the observable features of the work, but examining the formal order of the work, assessing how it is put together, is not the same thing as summary. It seeks to discover the artistry of the work (or the flaws), not reduce it to its most conventional elements.
If A Defense of Judgment does not finally provide a compelling alternative to current practice in academic literary study, it does help to make clear that the original (and still most coherent) justification for the study of literature in the university was rooted in the assumption that some kinds of imaginative writing were more worthwhile than others, and that by contemplating such works students would indeed acquire profound if intangible knowledge not available elsewhere. They would learn how to recognize great works of verbal art. This justification has been dismissed out of hand as incorrigibly elitist by most of those in the current "profession" of literary study. Given current cultural conditions, in the United States, at least, it is hard to see how that original warrant could ever be revived, even though on its current trajectory, the future of literary academe is most likely one that ushers in its demise.
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