A Defense of Judgment

Don't let the title fool you. The judgment that Michael Clune defends in A Defense of Judgment is not the activity of distinguishing Great Works according to a universal standard of taste. In fact Clune claims just the opposite. He dismisses as too constrictive the familiar criteria from the history of literary aesthetics (beauty, organic form, complexity, autonomy), noting that all such standards impoverish literature by excluding “many actual and possible artistic values” (181). Even more, Clune rejects altogether the common picture of judgment as the application of general criteria to specific cases in favor of judgment as a practice of discernment. When encountering a literary work, the critic's job is not to decide good or bad? or art or kitsch? but to discern the unique ways of thinking and feeling the text affords, and then to show readers and students why those ways matter. It's less about wielding criteria...