New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

This article thinks about the role of frustration in pedagogical encounters with texts. Taking as my case study the frequently frustrating (and frustrated) The Book of Margery Kempe, I ask: Why might this text elicit negative responses from first-time readers? What is so frustrating about Margery Kempe? And to what extent should we—as teachers, students, and scholars—attempt to repair our frustrated feelings about the text? Answering these questions involves some investigation into the much-discussed tension between reading symptomatically or sympathetically, and how we can learn (and teach) a permissibly affective response within the parameters of the discipline. I propose that, in fact, moments of frustration can act as “teaching moments” both for the student and the educator, because they remind us of the ways that the medieval text might elude or vex us, and of the expectations we place upon ourselves, as scholars, to respond in certain ways and with or without certain expressions of feeling. The paper concludes by arguing for the importance of learning to tolerate frustration, and with a redefinition of the reparative as a forward-looking, preparative mode.