『여인무사』 읽기를 통한 독자 반응과 정체성 정치학: 아시아계 미국문학 가르치기

Reader Response and Identity Politics in Reading The Woman Warrior: Teaching Asian American Literature

This paper aims to develop a pedagogical model of teaching Asian American literature at a college by presenting a case study of reading Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior in a college classroom. This study demonstrates how critical consciousness development can be achieved in a classroom of Asian American literature. This study suggests that the activity of reading Asian American literature might serve as a trigger event in which students are transformed from their own perspectives and are able to make sense of new experiences. The effective role of Asian American literature as a trigger event relies in students' strong emotional engagement in the literature. In reading The Woman Warrior with the problem-posing pedagogical methodologies such as free response, heuristic approach, and student-centered dialogue, students have voluntarily discovered that neither assimilation nor nationalism is the only way of identity politics of Asian Americans. Instead, they have come to realize that consciousness of hybridity absorbing two opposites is a necessary strategy for Asian Americans to survive in America, which can be also applied to Korean students themselves encountering with America -centered globalization in Korea.