인문학 위기와 영시 교육의 의미 - 워즈워스의 공동체적 상상력을 중심으로

The Public Meaning of Teaching English Poetry in the Threatening of the Humanities: With a Focus on Wordsworth"s Communal Imagination

&nbsp;&nbsp;The recent crisis of the humanities is the direct result of the commodity and market-centered capitalism that destroys our common culture by privatization and economization of all of the public sphere. Shortsighted maximization of profit, as the same principle as pursued in the corporations now, also threatens to destroy the public meaning of teaching English poetry in the universities. This kind of on-going economization accelerates current predicaments of the university and humanities education, of which roles now turn to be degenerated to the extent of being one of the major hindrances in sustaining communities.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This essay is to re-read William Wordsworth&quot;s poetry as a response to the rural crisis of Britain, that is, destruction of the &quot;rural England&quot; by a "savage torpor", a wild force of the Industrial Revolution. Wordsworth had presented his works as written in the situation of the divided nation, that of the rural and the urban. He had also presented himself as a spokesman for a particular class of men and of region, "the perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists" of the Lake District. According to him, local mountains and hills of the Lake District protected this rural Commonwealth by imposing themselves as a constitution for the rural Republic. Wordsworth describes that this is the only place for fostering the traditional republican virtues, or civic virtues, which have been regarded as now almost absent from rural communities. Wordsworth&quot;s communal imagination shall be reviewed as a possible way of how to face the recent crisis of humanities in our time, in the era of global capitalism.