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Ideas as Aesthetics: On Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment – Chicago Review

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In “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), Northrop Frye famously distinguished “casual value-judgements,” which belonged “not to criticism but to the history of taste,” from their opposite, based on “literary experience.”[1] In making the distinction, Frye sought to solve a problem that bedeviled literary studies from its inception: “literature” can be used descriptively, but it also has a normative dimension. Crucial though these normative dimensions were to the foundation of English as an academic discipline, they fit uneasily with the scientific project of the modern university. For literary studies to become a Wissenschaft, it needed to shed value judgments. Normative claims about what we should read, about which texts are worth attending to and which are not, depend on value judgments. Frye’s solution to this problem was to embed those value judgments within the objects themselves, thus giving the impression that, while the objectivity of the sciences might remain unattainable, so

Share this: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Instagram (Opens in new window) Instagram More Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email In “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), Northrop Frye famously distinguished “casual value-judgements,” which belonged “not to criticism but to the history of taste,” from their opposite, based on “literary experience.” [1] In making the distinction, Frye sought to solve a problem that bedeviled literary studies from its inception: “literatur

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