빅토리아 시대 문학과 문화 가르치기

Teaching Victorian Literature and Culture

The recent trend in the curriculum of English departments of the major universities is to break down traditional categories and combine them. For example,in the past the courses for the 19th century and the 20th century poetry were taught separately, but now those courses are combined into one course as ‘the 19th and 20th century poetry.’ This trend seems to have been triggered by the idea that students do not need or want to learn English literature at a deep level. To meet the demands of the students who have been inundated by popular culture, some departments offer the courses like ‘Reading the Best Selling Books’ or ‘Popular Literature.’ In this current situation, it may sound anachronistic to argue that a course of Victorian literature and culture, which covers only around 70 years and may seem dull, should be taught. However, learning about Victorian literature and culture is essential to understand the modern English and even American culture.And English departments should consider that a large number of the students want to study the background of the modern Western culture. Nonetheless, few departments offer the course because they failed to interest students with the traditional approach of teaching major novels in the period. To get students interested in this course, diverse literary texts and cultural aspects should be added. Non-canonical texts such as Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll would intrigue students. And why and how Victorian etiquette developed into the modern forms would also be interesting topics for them. In addition, various Victorian prose will be useful for students’ reading comprehension and critical thinking. The movements of Decadence and Aestheticism will help students to understand Modernism. This paper introduces a case study of teaching a Victorian literature and culture course in one of the universities in Seoul.