최석무 교수

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As a new trend in teaching English literature in college, children’s literature has been incorporated into the English Department’s curriculum. This has stirred up a heated debate on whether children’s literature is appropriate for ‘serious’ literary study. If children’s literature is to be acknowledged as suitable texts for college students alongside great literary works, a new methodology of research and teaching, such as critical literacy, is indispensible for a safe footing in the curriculum

When functional literacy is emphasized in reading a text, the relationship between the writer and reader can be understood in terms of power: readers, as powerless, are supposed to take the writer’s message in the text for granted. In a literary work, the writer implicitly reveals the message he or she intends to convey in the text by employing literary devices such as a title, an epigraph, a story introduction, illustrations, and book reviews. When we encourage students to follow those guidelin

In terms of class, race, or gender, critical literacy takes seriously the problem of inequality and injustice embedded in texts. Texts are considered as tools that are used for maintaining the status quo by constructing and communicating our identities, particularly in relation to others. While reading texts and identifying our roles in society, some feel empowered, and others, marginalized. Thus we need to challenge the characterization and the message included in those texts by asking problem-

Unlike an expository essay, a literary text can be read from multiple perspectives and can be interpreted in diverse ways. Among literary texts, Joyce’s works are noteworthy because of their ambiguities and social backgrounds, which enable us to interpret each work in diverse ways. “A Painful Case,” a story that was dismissed as one of his two weakest stories by Joyce himself, contains two discussion points the interpretations of which are open to readers: the title of the work and the newspaper

When a text is read from a critical literacy stance, the emphasis is placed on how to criticize power relations embedded in the text. The reading methodology aims at constructing “more egalitarian, equitable, and ethical educational and social environments.” To English literary works accepted and taught as canons in school, critical literacy needs to be applied in order to stop those works from endorsing the interests of the powerful. “The Dead,” in which power is given to the powerless, can be

By featuring a female character with multiple identities, “Clay” has drawn different critical attention over time. Since the short story consistently reminds us of “Cinderella” in terms of content and form, it can be understood as a modern version of that fairy tale. In this article, “Clay” is analysed in the context of two versions of Cinderella: Charles Perrault’s and Grimm Brothers. With more versions of the fairy tale, more complex and intricate interpretations with multifaceted perspectives

In the study of Joyce, his views on the disabled have been generally neglected even though there are relatively many disabled characters throughout his works. In Ulysses, Joyce’s representation of the disabled is both complicit and critical of the cultural stereotypes. Joyce often uses disability metaphorically, pointing out fundamental flaws in immoral or biased people’s character. Though his method of representation of the disabled is sometimes stereotypical, he still conveys subversive messag

The 2015 and 2022 Revised English Curricula emphasize critical and creative thinking skills, but CSAT lacks appropriate evaluation items for these skills. To bridge this gap, this study proposes creating assessment questions that measure these skills using narrative texts. Crafting multiple-choice questions with narrative texts proves challenging due to their interpretative nature. To tackle this challenge, the study suggests formulating questions that require interpreting texts from specific pe

"Imagined Communities": Discourses on the Formation of the Irish Nation and Nation-state in Joyce's Writings

To create puzzles, quizzes, and uncertainty, James Joyce incorporated ambiguities into his writings, even in one of his best-known short stories, “The Boarding House.” In this paper, a teaching framework for the story will be suggested for both the literary field and the English education field, with such textual ambiguities working as the backbone. Until now, relatively few studies have been conducted on how to teach Joyce’s works in a university setting. The class can be begun with a discussio

The purpose of this article is to reveal how women, compared with men, are represented in readings from seven different Korean textbooks, all similarly entitled High School English Readings (collectively abbreviated as Readings). This article begins by examining the level of influence of textbooks in spreading and consolidating gender bias. Next, the author offers the results of this study by classifying selected texts into sexist or progressive types. According to the study, as many as 12% (12

At the turn of the twentieth-century, adventure fiction was widely appropriated to encourage boys to be adventurous enough to participate in the expansion of the British Empire. In “An Encounter,” Joyce succinctly demonstrates how boys during this period read adventure stories and acted on those stories, exposing the political intention of the genre. In the story there were two boys—the narrator and Mahony—who read adventure stories, conducted mock battles, and went on an adventure for one day.

At the turn of the 20th century, Irish nationalists sought to devise a unique Irish identity that could be used to justify Ireland’s independence from Britain. Unlike other countries in Western Europe, in Ireland the Catholic Church played a major role in shaping the national identity; Catholic and Irish became interchangeable. Stephen Hero demonstrates how the Catholic Church supported the Gaelic Revival, a nationalist movement. The nationalist movement and the Catholic Church contributed to ma