‘포스트’이론과 문학교육

Abstract

This study aims at investigating a dialogic relationship between literary theory and literary education in the age of so-called “post”-theories in the ambiguous and controversial sense of the prefix ‘post’ both as after-theory and beyond-theory. The premise of this paper is that even though we are witnessing the proliferation and dominance of ‘theory’ in the current milieu of literary studies, it would be neither appropriate nor advisable simply to try to apply the extrinsic schema of theory to the interpretation of literary texts in the actual situation of the class. Instead, this paper argues that students’ “critical” competence in the sense of Paolo Freire’s “critical pedagogy” may be more naturally produced in the immanent process of closely reading the literary texts on the students’ own part rather than from a mechanical and reductive application of extrinsic ‘theories’ to the reading of the text. To illustrate this point, several examples of literary works across various literary genres are discussed and analyzed closely, along with some suggestions of practical pedagogic strategies involved in reading and teaching the specific texts. In particular,Susan Glaspell’s The Trifles for drama, E. B. Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”for poetry, and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness for the novel are discussed in detail, as representative works of each genre. However, in our attempt to recuperate the ‘critical’ position suggested in the literary text, we should be cautious not to naively reproduce the “authorial ideology” in the text but to read “against the grain” of the text when necessary. In connection to the ‘critical’ reading of literary texts, even in the courses focusing on ‘theory,’ the teacher should not forget that the ultimate goal of studying a theory lies in providing a ‘critical’ perspective necessary for the actual reading of a literary text, not in learning theory for theory’s own sake. In this respect, many theory textbooks do their best to give rich examples of how to read actual literary texts in a critical perspective of a certain theory. It is often the case that many ‘theoretical’ works in fact rely on practical reading of particular literary texts or apply various kinds of literary strategies for their own theoretical or philosophical discourses. Beyond the literariness of theoretical discourses, some literary works may involve a self-reflective ‘theory’ concerning the aesthetic nature of literary texts, and the teacher may organize a literature course around the self-reflective mode of selective texts to explore the theoretical ramifications embedded in the literary work itself. The conclusion suggests that ‘critical’ competence of the students in literature classes may be enhanced not by a simple reductive application of the theory to the text but by a close and immanent reading of the literary work itself which presumably embodies a certain critical perspective to “make you see” the world in a different way. These essential ‘critical’ strategies in reading literary texts may extend to the broadened area of “cultural studies” in what we might call the age of post-literature, which is characterized by the proliferation of various kinds of non-literary cultual texts.