Judgment and Its Publics

Abstract: This response essay overviews the timely interventions of Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment , which was published amid a larger sociopolitical crisis in expert judgment. Clune productively develops an account of the specialized nature of literary expertise. However, this essay also asks whether too much force is attributed to the logic of the market, and it similarly questions the vision of the public implicit to Clune’s model of literary studies.