ABSTRACT
Students often engage with literature across cultural and international boundaries in classrooms as well as in outside reading. This chapter addresses the concept of the social responsibility of readers along with cultural authenticity and accuracy. It also includes a discussion on transaction theory, an unseen but crucial aspect of reading where intercultural understandings are created. The chapter then suggests ways in which educators might create curriculum to teach young people about the role of the reader when responding to literature across geographies and cultures. Readers respond according to their knowledge, value systems, understandings of a particular literary genre, and experiences of the world—all of which are grounded in cultural ways of being. The concept of reader responsibility has been discussed in relation to literary, pedagogical, or theological studies, and termed in ways that include ethical reading, reader responsibility, and cosmopolitan reading.
