Reading Religious Literature and the Legitimacy of Misunderstanding: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Reading religious literature according to one’s own cultural and literary experience without accepting the meaning that is being offered yields no fruitful appreciation. The problem is not the individual rather social and historical. The alien readers imagine a question and look for an answer in the text from another culture, and come up with a misreading as a solution to their questions. These acts of misreading and misunderstanding are mechanisms with which literary productions and literary reception can be dialectically and dialogically mediated between different cultural and literary traditions. To misread the ‘other’ is for many a way of exposing a kind of ideological truth in one’s own literary and cultural tradition. This paper tries to throw light on how misunderstanding is the natural result of a cultural dialogue between readers of different cultures who try to attempt to analyse in the light of their own specific place and time in history and at the same time this ‘misunderstanding’ becomes the only way to understanding particularly in a cross-cultural literary study.