The Danger of Liaisons

Some researchers feel so close to certain literary works that they may have trouble looking at them critically. The work I hold in this special esteem is Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), by Choderlos de Laclos, which taught me, as a teenage girl, how the world works—or so I thought. What does this blind spot in my research imply about the way I believe we treat literature as professional critics? Specifically, how are critical approaches to literature unable to account for the complex relationship between our lives and our readings? This essay concerns my experience reading Laclos's text and how I felt the need to protect it from literary analysis. I also consider new methods for studying literature, such as those proposed recently by Rita Felski, which include our subjective reactions to our readings. Despite these new methods, Les Liaisons remains rebelliously outside the scope of my academic research.