Reading Texts Across Time and Culture

Texts travel. A play written for one city four hundred years ago is staged tonight on the other side of the planet; a folk tale crosses oceans and languages; a photograph taken in a single afternoon circulates for decades. Reading across time and culture is the capstone skill of the "Time and Space" unit: it asks you to hold a text's origin and its ongoing life in the same analytical frame.

Why meaning is not fixed

A central premise of the course is that meaning is produced, not simply stored, in a text. Words on a page are stable, but the meanings readers make from them depend on the knowledge, values, and questions they bring. This is why a text can be reinterpreted endlessly without changing a syllable. It also means interpretation is a responsibility: readers actively construct meaning