전통시 교육과 극적상황

Traditional Poetry Teaching and the Dramatic Situation

The meanings in a traditional poem are integrated into the speaker's attitude, in that, unlike in traditional novels and dramas, events or states are not simply conveyed but are related to by the speaker. This attitude as the speaker's subjective reaction necessarily lies within a specific and concrete situation, which is the dramatic situation where the speaker is currently saying. In this light, the concept of 'dramatic situation' serves as the way of teaching students the general feature of traditional poetry as dramatic speech act, i.e., the speaker's utterance as action enacted in a specific situation with specific intentions. In the interpretative process of poetry, the context develops itself from a loose one to a tight one, functioning both as tentative rule for verifying a hypothesized meaning and as meaning itself to be verified through a further phase of context. The dramatic situation works as the first phase of the context because it is the network of relatively simple and clear information about the speaker. Students thus need to first understand it, on the ground of which they can form proper hypotheses about more complicated and ambiguous meanings. It can be divided into three types on the basis of whether it involves a sub-situation and in terms of what tense and person the speaker is saying in. Being the indices for the degree and the aspect of the speaker's subjective involvement, those types can help students access poetry more proficiently and systematically.