Personal Risk in Criticism

Personal risk in criticism is the exposure that occurs when a critic reports personal response rather than hiding behind theoretical apparatus or impersonal analysis. When Wendy Lesser writes "I was moved," "I was bored," "I did not understand this," she is making claims that expose her sensibility to scrutiny and potential criticism. A reader might respond that Lesser's boredom reveals her limitations rather than the text's failure, that her emotional response is idiosyncratic and uninformative. This vulnerability is not a weakness but the source of the criticism's authority: the critic who risks personal exposure produces knowledge that the critic who maintains theoretical distance cannot access. The personal response, carefully attended to and honestly reported, is a form of empirical evidence—evidence of what this text did to this consciousness under these conditions. The evidence is not generalizable (another critic might respond differently) but it is real, grounded in a genuine encounter with the work. The risk is that the response might be wrong—might reveal the critic's