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Digital Publisher
Digital Commons at St. Mary's University
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Keywords
Reader Response Theory; Old English poem
Description
Reader Response Theory (Brizee et al.2014) asserts that “readers' reactions to literature [are] vital to interpreting the meaning of the text” (10). Reader Response (Fish 1981) approaches literary studies as way to explore how readers react to a piece of prose or a poem from a perspective developed within their interpretive communities. Interpretive communities hold a set of assumptions or strategies in common that shape the meaning of a text for a reader synchronically, at the moment of reading. Because the assumptions or strategies of these communities change over time, the meaning of a text for a reader can also change diachronically. Operating from this Reader Response perspective, I compare and contrast two translations of the Old English poem, “The Wanderer”, one from the medieval time period and the other from the twentieth century. The role of the reader and the production of meaning in an interpretive community remains critical for a healthy cultural and civic life as demonstrated by the negative impacts of misinformation on our contemporary interpretive communities.
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1 page
City
San Antonio, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
