포스트 코로나 시대의 국내 영문학교육: 트릴링의 문학교육관을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper tries to apply Lionel Trilling’s liberal views on literary education, which characterize his later thought, to the practice of English literary teaching in higher education in the post-Covid Korean society. Trilling argues that literary teachers must help (undergraduate) students dialectically form their own selves through and against the subversive modernist texts. The reading of literary text, especially that of the novels, contributes to the formation of an autonomous self by cultivating moral realism, liberal imagination and egalitarian and pluralistic fellow-feeling that is required in democratic society. This formation of an autonomous self has a vital importance in that it is linked to the formation of autonomous individual selves equipped with realism, flexibility, respect for diversity and democratic fellow-feeling in this post-Covid society rapidly polarizing into individual selfishness and collective madness. Likewise, teachers of English literature in higher education of today can contribute to the formation of autonomous individual selves compatible with the modern liberal society by fully foregrounding the subversiveness of social constructivism in critical theories, encouraging and respecting the students’ own judgment resulting from their wrestling with those subversive texts and directing their attention, especially in their teaching of the novels, to the protagonist’s struggle and fortitude, to the characters’ moral judgments and different, autonomous and equivalent fates.