문학과 문학교육의 의미

Redefining Literature in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Contexts: Pedagogical Implications of Research Trends on Literature Education in Anglophone Academia

This article aims to draw pedagogical implications of English literature education under the EFL context by critically inquiring research trends on literature education in Anglophone academia. For the past sixty years, these trends narrow down to three salient viewpoints. First, a liberal education after World War II had focused on patriotism, logical thinking, and appreciations of something emotional in the textual grain. Second, the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent Political Correctness have opened the way for reading against the textual grain. Third, literature education as a means of providing authentic language inputs for immigrants and adolescents has been stood out for the past twenty years. Since 2000, discussions about literature education has begun to leap over the limit of belles-lettres by comprising it under the larger boundary of literacy education in EFL context. In this vein, literacy does not strictly divide the text between literature and language education and the narrow boundary of text genres loses its validity. The learners can raise a sense of spontaneity so that they can creatively break apart many diverse means of communication from words to visual images and construct them on the basis of their own criteria. Thus, the meaning of literature can be defined as a relational web of diverse communicative means from which the learner can construct his or her own interpretations of the text.