문학텍스트 '또는' 문화텍스트? 해석과 실천을 위한 강의요목

Literary Texts 'Or' Cultural Texts? A Syllabus for Gnosis and Praxis

The crucial question of 'what and how to teach in the English literature classroom' has emerged in the wake of new historicisms that efface the traditional boundary between literature and history, center and margin of a text, and aesthetics and politics. A greater urgency is added to the question by the "multi-media revolution,' which has collapsed distinct domains of cultural practices into a unified circuit of consumerism. Under the circumstances, changes are being made in the English literature classroom, too. This paper investigates two issues involved in the current restructuring of curriculum and syllabus-and the resistance against it: the advocation for 'culture-oriented literary education" and the argument for 'return to close reading." As both arguments disclose limitations as well as validities, this paper takes an alternative approach and suggests a syllabus of English Renaissance that 1) overrides the-hierarchical-dichotomy of literary and cultural texts, 2) adopts the anthropological concept of culture rather than the Arnoldian one, 3) centers on the learners' independent perspectives and experiences-through performance-of the text, In sum, the syllabus is devised to engage the learners in a praxis of critical consciousness, which is essential to a civil society.