Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 27, 2025
I shall consider two types of judgment, in relation to my work as a critic and book reviewer. The first type of judgment is what we might think of as the arsenal of any decent project of good reading—searching for meaning; accruing and then learning how to use a kind of hermeneutic wisdom; looking for patterns; learning what to look for in a work of art. We might call this first type secular judgment. The second type of judgment is closer to religious judgment: judging, choosing, selecting, casting in and casting out, a process strongly associated, of course, with that terrifying apparition, the critic. I will examine the relations between these two types, and the ways in which, in literary studies, the first kind of judgment has steadily come to eclipse the second.
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 27, 2025
I shall consider two types of judgment, in relation to my work as a critic and book reviewer. The first type of judgment is what we might think of as the arsenal of any decent project of good reading—searching for meaning; accruing and then learning how to use a kind of hermeneutic wisdom; looking for patterns; learning what to look for in a work of art. We might call this first type secular judgment. The second type of judgment is closer to religious judgment: judging, choosing, selecting, casting in and casting out, a process strongly associated, of course, with that terrifying apparition, the critic. I will examine the relations between these two types, and the ways in which, in literary studies, the first kind of judgment has steadily come to eclipse the second.
