Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on May 14, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(2):177-194; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm024
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Seeing Things as They Are: Literary Judgment and Disinterestedness
*Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Everybody knows, it seems, that there's no such thing as disinterested judgment. Building on that firm foundation—or, rather, reasoning forward from that certain absence of foundations—it apparently follows that all judgments are interested—what else could they be?—and that the very practice of judgment is thus damagingly compromised, with all those interested judgments revealed as mere preferences that can have no pretension to authority. This is a bad argument, I think, filled with so many challengeable leaps and gaps that it's doubtful that even the most unmisgiving relativist makes or takes it seriously. But this argument, or something like it, does considerable damage nevertheless by lurking constantly in the background of contemporary academic conversation and doing its unexamined, but quietly undermining, work whenever the question of literary judgment is raised. I’d like to drag it forward in this essay, both in the belief that it will dissolve under close inspection and