실용주의적 문학관: 이론에 대한 저항과 경험의 수용

A Pragmatic View on Literature: Resistance to Theory and Acceptance of Experience

Theory of criticism, as it began to grow luxuriantly since the mid-twentieth century, seems to face its full blossom nowadays. This paper first explores both the gap between theory and practice and the subsequent feeling of disorientation inherent in the literary discourse of today. Then it interprets and introduces the pragmatic view on literature which is suggested, as a solution to the problems found in the field of present literary criticism, by such pragmatic writers as John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Harold Bloom, and C. S. Lewis. Those pragmatic writers in common point out, as the cause of those confusions, that the theory-dominated critical trend of today unduly severs human experience and then violently equalizes the different colors of experience. Those pragmatic writers respectively suggest, as an alternative to theory-dependent criticism, the recovery of the continuity and fullness of experience, reading of literary works as a spiritual exercise, the joy of solitary reading, and a wholehearted acceptance of literary experience. They all argue that a reader should focus his attention not just on the content of reading but on the modality of the act of reading, and that a critic aim at acquiring the fullness of experience, rather than that of self-indulgent authority and power from literary reading.