언어와 자각

Language and Awareness: Contemplative Approaches to Reading English Poetry

This study illustrates that the cultivation of awareness has a positive effect on the learner’s ability to read and appreciate English poetry. Poetry is characterized by its ungrammaticality, which inevitably asks for the more active engagement with the text than in other literary genres: readers are expected to interpret the text based on their innate and subjective senses, feelings, and thoughts, and the process of interpretation involves various occasions in which they can relativize and expand themselves in awareness of the world and themselves. Such awareness is an understanding of a situation or subject at the present moment based on our bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts that have been lost or removed from modern academic world. It is a cognitive ability deeply rooted in the existential and holistic world of experience. Contemplative science, which has been widely applied in the English-speaking world in the 21st century, can be a useful tool to help the learner to become well focused and balanced, perceptive, flexible, and open-minded in studying English poetry. The cultivation of awareness has improved the learner’s ability to read and understand literary texts, and the combination of the two disciplines─literature and contemplative science.