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I'd like to commend Jessy for making some important clarifications about both Kauffman's article and the value of the falsification that took over Tuesday's class when our concepts of self were threatened.  I agree that the notions of personal testimony and individuality itself mean very different things and carry with them distinct dangers depending on the scenario in which they appear.  In an academic sphere, I have a difficult time conceiving of a situation in which I would find the exploitation of personal testimony or experience as authority to be a compelling or even credible argument.  For example, if in studying a piece of literature about say, the Vietnam War, I found myself in conflict with a critic who happened to be a veteran, I do think he would be destroying the dialogue by asserting his opinion's supremacy with the, "I was there.  I understand.  I know.  You never can," argument.  If the work is unable to communicate effectively to the both of us, with the vast difference in life experience, it itself is a failure.   Those who do argue the value of personal testimony in criticism are insulting the authors they critique. 

However, as Jessy articulates, the personal in life, art, and work are very different things.  Kauffman's complaint was obviously against the intrusion of the personal into the professional, but when she strayed from this central topic, I found her coming awfully close to condemning personal experience as utilized in the writing of literature, which seems more than a bit ridiculous to me, if not impossible.  While bashing my beloved Doris Lessing, she writes of The Golden Notebook, "Anna Wulf is represented as suffering a schizophrenic 'breakdown' at the hands of sexist society... evidence of her 'cure' is that the novel commences with her novella 'Free Women.' Fiction is thus reduced to a tragic representation of life; 'life' is reduced to a tale of individual malaise.  The implicit message is that you cannot change society, only yourself.'  I do not understand this conclusion.  First, her reading of this specific novel seems to suggest that she views society as something entirely separate from the human person, rules, structures empty of people (and hence, to my mind, worthless).  To change society is to change the hearts and minds of those who make up the society.  So, to change oneself is to change society.  This pertains to the personal testimony question because Kauffman also seems to be saying here that novels ought not to be about human lives.  This confuses me.  Whether she is crying out for the very didactic or the allegorical, or some other alternative to the vast majority of literature we know and respond to today I am not sure, but even these forms must neccesarily be stories about people, people and their experiences.  Literature communicates in a way different from essays and speeches and political platforms because it can connect people's personal experiences to one another's, perhaps wake them up to how their personal experiences fit into the world.  It saddens me the Kauffman, a literary critic seems not to believe this.  She whines, "Didn't we say goodbye to personal testimony, with its valorization of the power and autonomy of the individual psyche, a long time ago?" and she is talking about literature, not criticism.  I still believe that personal testimony in literature is a tremendously valuable, if not the only effective manner of expression.