Aesthetic Judgment and its Suspension
The suspension of aesthetic judgment can be liberating. Not having to worry at every moment about "how good it is" is a foundational gesture in contemporary literary and cultural studies.  The raw material for many kinds of investigation would simply not be available if it first had to pass an acid test of judgment.
"Positivist" and Other Terms of Praise
A colleague who read my previous post suggested to me that I was calling for a basically "positivist" style of literary scholarship, akin to the would-be empirical investigations of nineteenth-century philologists and historians. He didn't mean that in a positive way. And thereon hangs a twentieth-century literary-historical tale...