Michael W. Clune

It’s impossible to cordon off judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.

I’m saying that it has value, not just for me but for everyone

The absence of a defense of judgment paralyzes our
capacity to defend our discipline at a time when it is threatened on many fronts.

Commercial culture, by declaring all preferences equal, gives me no reason to be skeptical about my own values. Aesthetic education, by denying that all preferences are equal, gives me reason to be skeptical about my existing values.

My defense of judgment is designed to liberate this existing community, with its skills, traditions, and protean valuing capacities.

Aesthetic education isn’t the process of getting students to like the same objects they formerly disliked. It is the practice of enabling them to see what had been concealed.

The legacy of Kant’s aesthetics has been nowhere more baleful than in the idea that aesthetic judgment must restrict itself to formal concerns rather than concepts. To correct this, my practical judgments lean in the opposite direction. It is from my encounter with the astonishing conceptual dynamism of literature that my account of ideas in literature, found in the theoretical part of the book, has its origin

David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.

or reasons I will detail, this skeptical, empirical, and materialist model of judgment as the consensus of those best educated in the arts represents a viable model for aesthetic education in the way that later models—from Kant to Adorno—do not

Among the most exciting critical developments of recent years has been the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts. Critics have made diverse claims on its behalf, among which we might discern two widely shared themes. First, aesthetic education does not constitute a retreat from politics but rather a means of contesting the neoliberal hegemony of the market. Second, the critics’ emphasis on the aesthetic’s political potential is matched by an unprecedented refusal of aesthetic judgment.