감정/윤리/영어교육을 위한 로이스 로우리의 『기억전달자』 읽기

Reading Lois Lowry's The Giver for Emotional/Ethical/English Education

This paper explores the possibility of acquiring English, literary feeling and ethical consciousness through teaching young adult literature such as Lois Lowry's The Giver in an EFL situation. The first section defines the novel as a future dystopia onto which the fin de siècle's anxiety of disappearing childhood is projected and thus interprets its narrative in terms of the protagonist, Jonas' recovery of the lost childhood with vivid feeling and moral consciousness. For the discussion, Giorgio Agamben's idea of infancy was borrowed. The second section attempts textual analysis, specifically focusing on vocabulary and sentence patterns changing along with Jonas' acquisition of new feeling and moral consciousness. The last section is an analysis of the students' reading response to The Giver. Focusing on the students' responses to Jonas' feeling, their empathy, infatuation with the story, and the accompanying ethical cognition, this study confirms the importance of feeling and ethical consciousness evoked by literary imagination in language learning.