This study focused on the experience of death in modern poetry. By analyzing modern poetries that contain this experience, how the poetic subject reacts imaginatively to the uncomfortable feelings of the experience such as fear or vanity and how reade...
This study focused on the experience of death in modern poetry. By analyzing modern poetries that contain this experience, how the poetic subject reacts imaginatively to the uncomfortable feelings of the experience such as fear or vanity and how readers take the works were investigated. Through this, the study sought what educational possibilities literary education can open in the dis-educational imagination like the experience of death and the forbidden emotions that correspond to this imagination. The following is a summarization of the efforts made by this study:Death could not be treated as a real experience, because it is one and only to every individual in the real life and if discussed in the literary works it already becomes other`s experience. Therefore, death is an absent experience in literature. However, there are exceptional cases in which one experiences death or has a very close experience by facing it. This is emotional experience to death. It is very hard to figurate this experience aesthetically or justify it ethically. The strength of the experience or the length it continues is too big, too lengthy and too direct to be handled. This also applies to the reader, which makes most of the following experience to be avoided. However, avoiding the experience of death is not just because of biological nor existential reasons. Also, it is not because the aesthetical figures can not soften the emotional shock. There are more societal and cultural factors in experiencing death. When faced with death, reader is influenced by the contexts of receipting death constituted from his/her life condition. Then (s)he expects that literary works can make human experience being worthy through the aesthetical figuration and ethical justification. If (s)he feel the experience of death an uncomfortable feeling, through the literary work, (s)he interprets it as the sign of a dearth of the aesthetical figuration. But the dearth of the aesthetical figuration begins with absence of another context different from real life. The literary education should make students can enjoy their cultural life through the literary work. From this point of view, this study suggested that the literary education needs to diversify the appreciative context of the works and the societal-cultural context of experience. Those two contexts are the fundamental issues given to human who must live with not only the pleased and beautiful but also the fearful and horrible.