영문학 입문과목, 어떻게 가르칠 것인가?

How to Teach Introduction to English Literature

This is a kind of position-paper on the important pedagogical issue of how and what to teach in an introductory course in English literature in Korea. What must the instructor have in mind in designing a 15-16 week course in English literature for students who have virtually no literary training and mayor may not wish to major in English? How much of the background knowledge of English history and the literary history, English and Continental, should be considered necessary and adequate in the very first course that is supposed to initiate students to the "pleasures of reading" the "alien" text written in English? What role do literary theories play in such a course? Would it be better that "cultural studies" instead of literary training should be the defining role of the English department, as many would-be reformers of education nowadays propose? This paper answers to these questions by emphasizing that the primary task of any introductory course in literature resides in training the students in the basic skills of reading, in making the students "responsible" readers who are able to "respond" properly to the subtlety of literary texts. In this respect, the pedagogical implication of what the New Critics have shown in their analysis and explication of literary works needs to be revaluated, regardless of their assumptions, theoretically unjustifiable though it may finally be, about the presence of 'text itself," Their efforts may be understood as an outcome of their pedagogical strategy to cope with a situation of mass education, which is also the situation we now work in, where we have to cope with students with neither appropriate experience in literature nor competence to deal with the English language. We cannot emphasize too much that the first and foremost objective of the course is in the training of the students in close reading of literary texts and in the intense experience of as many specimens of literary works as possible.