시소설과 시소설을 통한 영어교육의 가능성

Verse Novel and the possibility of English Education through verse novel: poetic licence and sense image in Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust and Witness

Combining various aural and visual images of poetry and of novel, verse novel as a hybrid has a potential to create sense images more than any other literary genre. This paper, based on the Russian Formalist’s concept of ‘Defamiliarization,’ David Miall’s, and Don Kuiken’s experiments in the areas of cognitive linguistics and psychology, contends that the foregrounded sense images evoked through poetic licence of verse novel capture the reader’s attention and oblige the reader to slow down, allowing time for the feelings created by the poetic versification, and then feelings guide ‘refamiliarizing’ interpretative efforts. This process requires cognitive work on the part of the reader and the reader’s feeling as well. Speaking from the viewpoint of English education, therefore, text with abundant sense images through foregrounding or ‘stylistic variation’ will facilitate student readers’ English acquisition and develop their feeling and imagination. Therefore, verse novels of young adult literature with vivid sense imageries can function as useful English texts for students under EFL situation. Good examples are Karen Hesse’s two verse novels, Out of the Dust, a Newbery Medal winning novel, and Witness. Both of the novels are narrated with various poetic versification such as rhyme, rhythm, repetition, caesura, enjambment, alliteration, assonance and consonance. Besides, enjoying the freedom of poetic licence, the two verse novels devise new poetic patterns that suit their message and evoke the sense image to the fullest. All of these poetic techniques contribute to maximize foregrounding of the sense images of the novels and, as its result, attract (student) readers’ attention and help the emergence of their feelings and imagination. This whole process of understanding literary text becomes a constructive part of the reading process through which the (student)reader inscribe new sounds, words, phrases, and the story in their memory.