영상문화 시대의 영미문학교육의 패러다임 전환

Utilizing Multimedia in Class: Three Examples

Although few would today question the drastic social transformations broght forth by the advent fo digital and audio-visual culture, the hegemonic influence currently exerted by multimedia industry poses a specific set of new problems for the school of humanities, the depratments of literature in particular. If the wide,multi-layed consequences trailing the stll-on going digital revolution cannot but merit the much-overused expression 'paradigm shift,' so much so in fact that they leave no possible room for 'delinking' in any real, effective sense, how does this dramatically changed state of things affect the pedagogic approach in literary disciplines of higher education? In order to more critically engage this issue, one would have to examine our present national situation and the academic milieutherein via a vis not only those of other more and less advanced countries in the world but the particular historical time frame which gave rise to Thomas Kuhn's coinage of the expression in the early sixties United States. Nevertheless, in so far as the situation of a literary scholar still remains- after all the strenuous efforts of soul-searching and autocritique- that of a septuagenarian facing a growing body of generations irrecusably steeped in, if not indeed wired to, the all-powerful global teletechnological machinery, the need becomes all the more exigent that one utilizes at least certain forms of multimedia in teaching if only to get in touch with the other members of academic community that make up the majority of this increasingly-socialized/commercialized (in the negative sense underscored by Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant) instruction called university. By drawing reference from both Kuhn's theoretical framework and my personal experience of teaching in the jumanities over the last two years, the present paper argues that the more effective way of problematizing and challenging this epochal turn may be to fully incorporate multimedia materials in class- namely, rudimentary audio materials, images, short film clips as well as major motion pictures- not so much to catch the unwelcome intruder at the gates but so as to bring to view the variegated registers at which various Western/Eastern cultural heritages of both present and past funcion in a markedly overdetermined fashion to constrain and constrict our daily existence in out avowedly dissymmetrical geopolitical condition. In that way not only will we be able to attain a more balanced view of the transitional condition fo out humanities but more importantly secure a chance to fundamentally reform the polarized division of labor that undergirds the present university system.