For the fifth week of TORCH Goes Digital, we focused on the theme of “Reading”. Reading encompasses a fascinating interaction between the written word and the reader. The process is shaped by prior knowledge, experiences, attitude, and the language community—which is culturally and socially situated.
We also highlighted two Book at Lunchtime discussions centred around Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France, and Reading the Code. In the former, author Helen J. Swift (Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) joined an expert panel to discuss how late-medieval French writers used literary representation of the dead as a springboard for exploring the nature of human being. In the latter, panellists discussed whether language is a simple code, or whether meaning is conveyed as much by context, history, and speaker as by the arrangement of words and letters?
