The centrality of the relation between the particular and the universal to the idea of the experience of beauty—is worked out at length in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant describes as “reflecting judgment” the kind of judgment that takes you from the observation of a certain thing to a feeling of the value of that thing in general, that takes you from the particular to the universal without stopping anywhere along the way.
Here, Min Hyoung Song describes what he calls the “dynamic tension” between the particular and the universal as central to the possibility of great art. One fun thing about the video is watching Song manage categories like “great” and “universal,” which have come under a great deal of suspicion, as he attempts to renew their value without reinforcing their historic whiteness and masculinity. Are these categories still be available to us today? Should they be? And if so, how?
Biography
Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department at Boston College, and the former director of the Asian American Studies Program there. His most recent book is Climate Lyricism, which won the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) Ecocritical Book Prize and has been short-listed for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Brook Prize. He is also the author of two other books, The Children of 965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The Children of 1965 won the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Prize in Literary Criticism, the Alpha Sigma Nu Award in Literature and Fine Arts, and received an Honorable Mention for the ASAP Book Prize. He is the general editor (with Rajini Srikanth) of the four-volume series "Asian American Literature in Transition" for Cambridge University Press, and co-editor (with Rajini Srikanth) of The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature. In addition to numerous shorter publications in edited volumes and academic journals, his writings have appeared in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, The Chicago Review of Books, and the Margins.