전통시 해석의 원리와 과정

The Interpretative Principle and Process of Traditional Poetry

A problem that teachers face in traditional poetry classes is that most students take poetry as too difficult to interpret on their own. They are very likely to rely on other's interpretations, usually found on the internet, and accept them uncritically. This is just because they have never learned how to interpret poetry. Teachers, I would argue, then need to teach and train them how to interpret poetry as well as to explain their interpretation. For that purpose I suggest a systematic examination of the interpretative principle and process of traditional poetry. Being a coherent narrative text, traditional poetry can be viewed as a hierarchically leveled structure where a semantic level is summarized into an upper, more abstract level. The hierarchical levels reflect interpretative process, but the real steps of interpretation does not follow a linear process. Rather, the levels are interconnected in a continuous coming and going. The same happens for the parts within a level, especially, the discursive structure. Interpretation is based upon a kind of inference, abduction, with which the reader forms a hypothesis about the context and tests it in the course of his further reading, which necessarily involves a continuous coming and going. The hypothesized context functions as the tentative rule for explaining the meanings of the given part in accordance with its logical consistency. If the context turns out to be invalid, the reader should form a revised hypothesis so that all the meanings can be coherently explained under it. The interpretation of traditional poetry is therefore a process going back and forth with the repetitive cycle of forming, testing and reforming hypothesized contexts.