Discernment: Taste, Attention, Literacy

Nina Power (University of Roehampton)

What we decide to turn our attention to is no small matter. It is now possible to imagine a culture that produces exactly what we want to hear or see, an entire circus designed just for us. It’s getting harder to separate good culture from bad, what’s fake from what’s real, and to draw definitive lines between the human and the machine. 

Are we really entering a period of cultural decline? We are in the midst of a supposed ‘literacy crisis’, where people have stopped reading (or stopped reading well), where audiences have lost the ability to tell good from bad art, fiction from fact, or author from character. What is the real history of taste, discrimination, critique, and judgement? How can we improve our own ability to discern? 

In four sessions, Discernment will discuss a different facet of the problem of discernment. Beginning with Imagination, it will then turn to Taste, Attention, and Literacy. The course will investigate—through reading, lectures, and seminars—how we make sense of making sense, how we decide, differentiate, and judge, and how we can develop our own powers to handle the coming cultural apocalypse.  

Thinkers covered include Monroe C. Beardsley, Pierre Bourdieu, Simone Weil, Immanuel Kant, Jonathan Rose, James Marriott, R.G. Collingwood, David Hume, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, Timothy Williamson, Harold Bloom, Walter Ong, Clement Greenberg, Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Ivan Illich, and St. Ignatius of Loyola.