문화연구를 통한 문학연구의 확장 가능성에 대한 고찰

Abstract

Established in higher education as a dominant discourse, literary study has exercised a powerful hegemony in the academy since the early twentieth century. It proclaimed that it could provide the core for a modern education in the humanities by practicing the old ideal of humanist education, that is to say, producing a gentleman and a scholar in a Christian society. In the meantime, the institution of literary study has rested on an relatively secure and unchallenged foundation of literary canon and highbrow culture of the elite. Recently, however, literary study as a privileged canon was challenged, fell into crisis, and finally collapsed. And it is now being transformed into the so-called broader Cultural Studies which incorporates both canonical literary texts and non-canonical cultural texts. Cultural studies suggests that literary study embrace popular culture, such as film, television, video, advertizing, pop songs, comics, and popular novels, all of which as a social document faithfully registers the Zeitgeist of the times and permeates everyday experience and life. As a result, the distinction between canonical texts and non-canonical ones became eroded.