학부 셰익스피어 강의와 문체론적 연구

Stylistic Approaches to the Teaching of Shakespeare in Undergraduate Classroom: A Case Study of King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1

Quite a few attempts have recently been made to renovate the curriculum of undergraduate Shakespeare and improve its teaching methods in the Korean context of higher education. Most of those efforts, however, have concentrated on visual materials and theatrical components which are expected to lessen the anxiety of students and to stimulate their motivation of learning. While recognizing the values and benefits of introducing visual materials and theatrical components to the teaching of Shakespeare, I would suggest that more energy should be put into helping students develop a linguistic and cultural sensitivity to the language of Shakespeare and that stylistics or literary linguistics could come in handy to augment students’ understanding of language and literary features. By focusing on the opening scene of King Lear, this paper attempts to demonstrate how useful a stylistic approach could be pedagogically in undergraduate Shakespeare classes. I attempt to analyze the chosen scene by drawing upon three different linguistic features−the usage of comparative and superlative, the alternation of thou and you, and the issue of face with turn-taking and recognition−which styliticians often take seriously for the analysis of literary texts. Those linguistic features, I claim, are very dexterously deployed in Shakespeare’s scene to the degree of generating theatrical excitement and denoting thematic significance. With such a stylistic analysis of one scene from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, I would strongly suggest that we need to make our students be more familiarized with stylistic knowledge and tools and thus apply them to their critical reading of Shakespeare’s texts. Teaching Shakespeare from the perspective of stylistics does not deny the value of employing theatrical and visual elements, but rather tries to turn them into more effective complementaries to literary studies by aiming at learners’ augmented sensitivity of language.