ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses college students’ interpretations of the epic poem, The Lusiads, by the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camoes. It presents a theoretical framework for understanding how students’ ethnic backgrounds and their knowledge of other social texts influence their meaning transactions with this epic poem. The chapter focuses on the analysis of oral classroom discussions and written responses to the assigned reading. The findings suggest that students should be encouraged to engage in reading transactions that are meaningful to them. The myriad of social and ethnic intertextual links students created enabled them to first understand themselves in relation to the text and ultimately to travel through the reading in order to understand the epic poem and the intentions of the author. The work of Louise Rosenblatt, a literary theorist, and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1993), a literary theorist and a philosopher of language, provide the theoretical lenses to explore how students transact with The Lusiads.
