현대영미시 강의 운용의 한 방법

On a Theme-Based Teaching of Modern British and American Poetry

It is not surprising to find English poetry courses are reduced in number or replaced by more parctical English courses because students believe English poetry doesn not meet their need to improve their English skills and enhance their Toeic or Toefl scores essential for getting a job. Under these circumstances, poetry teachers in college are feeling a sense of crisis or unworthiness, and even fear that it will not take long to witness the construction of museums in which poetry-related materials are exhibited as rare collections like extince dinosaurs. This paper aims to introduce a way of making up a course pack and syllabus of Modern British and American Poetry which intends to encourage or coax students into believing that poetry is closely related to the real world around them. The course uses an edited course pack made up of accessible poems instead of selecting The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poety(2003) for the textbook for the following reasons: First, Norton includes too many poems to be covered in just a 16-week course period. Second, despite its bulkiness, Norton excludes the poems which help students recognize that modern poetry is not an extraterrestrial thing. For example, it leaves out Rich's "Frame", among others, which I believe show a critical facet of racial discrimination in the US.It does not choose Snyder's "The groves are down" and "Front Lines," either, which deal with the devastation of natural environment by human avarice. Edited for the one-semester undergraduate course, the course pack arranges poems according to themes and topics such as war, men and women, ethnic experiences, criticism of America from inside, man and nature, young and old, eternity and religion, reality and imagination. Even though these subjects and themes do not cover the overall issues of Modern British and American poetry, they at least help students find that modern poetry has something to do with the real world they live in and encourage them to get more intersted in it.