Reading it Personally: Robert Glük, Margery Kempe, and Language in Crisis.

This article focuses on the book "Book of Margery Kempe." It offers a postmodern "defamiliarization" of a medieval text that has, thanks to its popularity as an object of analysis, become, for many scholars and teachers, a bit routine, perhaps even mundane. Critic Lisa Manter has argued persuasively that conventional scholarship on Kempe tends to "erase the idiosyncrasies of Kempe's text in order to extract a generalizable cultural or psychological schema." This tendency exists not only in studies of Margery Kempe's Book, but in literary criticism generally. At its best, critical theory offers unexpected insights and fresh perspectives. Too often, though, it devolves into the maintenance of formulaic and predictable paradigms. What has variously (perhaps misleadingly) been called "autobiographical" or "confessional" criticism offers a provocative, productive alternative. Though reading from the "I" position may transgress the norms of traditional academic practice, it engages a powerful interpretive lens, one that acknowledges the situatedness of its scope and the complexities of its operation.