11/12 11. Comparative and Cross-Cultural Reading Free Online FlashCards

What is the purpose of comparative reading?

Comparative reading places works in relation while examining how each produces meaning through language, form, cultural assumptions, historical situation, and relationships to other texts.

Why does cultural context matter in literary reading?

Context explains why a formal feature or conflict has force for an original audience; it should clarify textual analysis rather than replace it.

Why is translation considered interpretation?

Translation is both linguistic transfer and cultural re-contextualization because translators make choices about syntax, register, metaphor, rhythm, idiom, sound, and audience.

How does comparative reading define literary genres?

Genres are systems of expectation that shape ideas about plot, character, voice, time, performance, authority, and endings.

What is an adaptation?

An adaptation reworks material from an earlier work, story, genre, medium, or tradition by changing elements such as setting, perspective, ideology, audience, or historical period.

What is intertextuality?

Intertextuality describes how a text gains meaning through relationships with other texts, genres, discourses, and cultural forms.

What sequence supports comparative close reading?

Begin with a precise feature, describe its details, establish each work’s local logic, add relevant context, examine mediation, and form a relational claim.

What should a comparison establish?

A shared problem gives the comparison focus, while preserving differences in each work’s values, forms, and cultural assumptions.

What three questions guide comparative interpretation?

Readers should examine each work’s formal choices, the cultural and historical conditions shaping them, and what becomes visible when the works are read together.

What does cross-cultural reading require readers to avoid?

A culture is not uniform, and an author should not be treated as a spokesperson for an entire nation or ethnic group.

What distinguish domestication from foreignization?

Domestication makes a foreign reference more familiar, while foreignization preserves some of its strangeness for the receiving reader.

What can translation lose and gain?

Translation may lose puns, rhyme, alliteration, cultural associations, grammatical ambiguity, or literary echoes, but it can also create new meanings in the receiving language.