Questions of Judgment

Questions of Judgment Michael W. Clune (bio) Is Literary Judgment Too Deep for the Classroom? A friend of mine once complained to me about what he saw as faint praise. "They say I'm advancing the conversation," he told me. "But I don't want to advance the conversation. I want to end it." I formulated my primary argument in A Defense of Judgment to end a conversation. As Simon During, in his searching and generous response helpfully summarizes, my first argument is that "judgment should be key to contemporary literary pedagogy" (254). Since I've never heard a strong argument to the contrary—and many critics, including some in this special issue, have had an opportunity to make such counterarguments—I think this particular conversation should be regarded as closed. The interesting conversations that I want to open—such as what motivated the bizarre denial of judgment on the part of several generations of literary critics—only take off once we achieve consensus on the first argument. As During "wholeheartedly" agrees with my initial position, he moves on to the book's second argument, which relates to the forces that led critics to deny their practice of literary judgement. Summarizing this, During writes, "Clune argues that judgment can help us resist the neoliberal, market-aggrandizing regime in which consumer choice becomes a primary model for action. End Page 333 Under that regime, the view that some aesthetic objects are better than others has been displaced by one for which all such objects have equal value so that preferring or choosing one over another is just a matter of personal taste." During says he is "pretty much" on board with this argument too. His slide from "wholehearted" agreement to "pretty much" agreeing accords with my own feeling, which is that this second argument, while I think it's strong, isn't quite of the conversation-ending type. I'll have more to say on this later. But for now, we'll move to the third of my book's arguments—the account of how judgment works, or should work, in academic literature departments. And here During writes that "in a spirit of productive rectification, I begin to want to interject, not quite to dissent from, but rather to supplement, his account, as well as to point out certain gaps and problems" (255). I readily concede that this dimension of the book is significantly more complex than the others, and therefore more amenable—in theory—to "productive rectification." But I will confess here to an idiosyncratic personal reaction—not a judgment, exactly, but perhaps a matter of private taste. The phrase "productive rectification" makes me slightly nervous, calling to mind the kind of team building, vaguely bureaucratic, mildly uplifting, and substantively empty chatter that too often colonizes the question-and-answer period after academic lectures. Of all conversations, I prefer to avoid those of the "productive rectification" type. It was thus with a sense of relief that I quickly realized that behind this mild opening During proceeds to articulate a powerful, thoroughgoing attack on my entire position—an attack which, if successful, would not only doom my third argument, but also pull the first two down with it. He writes that, at a certain point, literary judgments will reach "decisions of ultimate importance, decisions concerning the meaning of existence itself" (259). We cannot, in other words, cordon off the question of John Milton's or Emily Dickinson's literary value from the existential, religious, political, and cultural beliefs that literary value depends on. Let's take an example from my sixth chapter, one During doesn't explicitly address but that will serve to illustrate his point. The value of Thomas Bernhard's fiction can, in a superficial way, be established on the basis of its importance to a certain strand of literary history. And perhaps I might succeed in enabling readers and students to appreciate its brilliant, contagious dark humor a little more deeply. But how deeply? Eventually, During implies, the answer to the question—is Bernhard's work good? Is it worth spending time with in a world where time is finite?—will depend on students assenting [End Page 334...