What have we lost when the expert aesthetic judgement of professors and literary critics is replaced by the marketplace and bestseller lists? How can someone be both a critic and a creator, and do those identities improve or detract from each other?
Michael W. Clune is a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the author of several books, including the subject of this discussion, A Defense of Judgment, and the upcoming novel Pan.
Greg and Michael discuss Michael's perspective on the necessity of judgment in the study of literature and the arts, contrasting it with the modern academic trend that moves away from making definitive evaluations. Michael draws parallels between literary criticism and economics, highlighting a shift towards egalitarianism and market-driven valuations at the expense of aesthetic judgment. Their conversation delves into the historical evolution of these ideas, the importance of close reading, and the role of literary education in transforming personal taste and understanding.
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Episode Quotes:
Michael finds it counterintuitive and strange that there is no public standard for distinguishing great art from mediocre art.
05:18 To say that there's no public standard for judging some work’s better than the other and to say that everyone should make their own judgements and professors and critics and museum curators shouldn't try to tell people what's good and what's not, that presents as like, oh, everyone gets to choose.There's no public standard. But in fact, what you actually see happening is that it's the replacement of one standard, the judgment of those educated in the arts by another standard, which is the marketplace. And so, bestseller lists basically replace the canon that's constantly changing and there's all of complex judgments, but that's basically the displacement. So in fact, it's not really an egalitarian move in the way that many of its proponents take it to be. It's actually a disavowal of the expertise of aesthetic educators and throwing everything to the kinds of orderings produced by the marketplace.
Everyone can make artistic judgments.
03:01 There's no coherent way to do literary study or to teach art history without making judgments all the time. That's just the nature of it.
The practice of teaching literature requires tacit skills.
20:01 When it comes down to the brass tacks of pedagogy of teaching, and this is a famous thing about literary study, let's say Moby Dick, you could imagine a version of the class where I just talk about Moby Dick and no one reads it, and I describe how great it is and how wonderful it is, and how it's surprising and strange and so forth. You could do that in chemistry. You could do something like that in economics or in physics, but in literature, the student has to encounter it for him or herself, right? It's like nothing is happening unless they're encountering for themselves, unless they have the experience in which something magical is disclosed to them. And so, the actual practice of teaching literature involves what the chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, described as tacit skills, which is really simply a kind of knowing how, without being able to say exactly what you're doing.
Aesthetic education is a vital human need and universities are failing to provide it
44:01 The desire for aesthetic education, the desire to have one's taste, be guided to know what books one should look at, how one should read those books, how one should spend one's precious time. That desire is totally out there and is very strong and is not being met by literature departments in the way that I think they should. I think it's a tragedy and a big mistake that literature in our departments are no longer fulfilling that vital human need.
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unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc