창간기념 발제논문 : 영상텍스트와 문학연구방법의 확장 = Film as an Extension of Literature

다국어 초록 (Multilingual 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 score for a modern education in the humanities by practicing the old ideal of humanist education, the aim of which is to produce a gentleman and 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 canon was challenged, fell into crisis, and finally collapsed. 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 now embrace popular culture, such as film, television, video, advertising, pop songs, comics, and popular novels, all of which as a cultural text and a social document faithfully resisters the Zeitgeist of the times and permeates everyday experienced and life. As a result, the distinction between canonical texts and non-canonical ones became eroded. As the binary opposition between high and popular culture on which literary study was founded became under attack, Cultural Studied steps aside from elite literature and includes the texts of everyday life in its object of study, considerably broadening the horizon of the field of literary study. In the past, literary study dismissed popular texts as something that seriously lacks imagination and unity. Cultural Studies argues, however, that is also possible to apply a system of `deep` or `close` reading previously practiced only on canonical texts to popular non-canonical texts. Cultural Studies thus opens up a whole new possibility for studying and teaching literature and culture, even through it entails some unsolved methodological in practice. Opening up the canon by Cultural Studies seems to be inevitable in this age of popular culture and so does the collapse of the old paradigm of literary study based on the privileged center of canonical texts and highbrow literature. Cultural Studies, then, could be a new paradigm for the future, which would significantly enlarge the scope of literary study.