Exporting Expertise

Abstract

Abstract Literary scholars are understandably keen nowadays to compensate for institutional vulnerability by asserting the field’s indispensability. But they haven’t stopped there. Critics are positioning themselves at the metacritical epicenter of solutions to crises in the humanities at large. Is this a mark of extradisciplinary generosity, a selfless imparting of reformist know-how? Or is the appetite for standing at the heart of cross-disciplinary rejuvenation the latest installment in literary studies’ longstanding enchantment with its own transformative potentiality, reaffirming its unflagging belief in the capacity to matter beyond the shared lexicons and methodological precincts of its own constituents? Provoking these questions, Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment (2021) and Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason (2021) offer audacious propositions for revivifying the way we articulate the value of connecting aesthetic experiences and humanist literacies to the production of knowledge. To achieve this, they depend on certain generalizations about the collective behaviors and inclinations that have shaped literary and cultural studies’ fortunes, generalizations that allow them to ascertain not only how aesthetic education and humanist reason, respectively, might contribute to the humanities’ durability, but also how scholars might export their critical and pedagogical expertise far beyond the boundaries of their own discipline.[These] books demonstrate in revealing ways the stakes of literary critics positioning themselves at the source—as the source?—from which urgent arguments flow about the utility and exportability of expertise, about the moral and political valences of critical writing, and about the value of getting a humanist education.