문학교육을 통한 개인의 치유와 발달

Abstract

Literary imagination has both exploratory and corrective aspects. The one helps us to broaden the breadth of ourselves by immersing us into to others’ lives and culturesthrough literature, because the exploratory imagination make us acquainted with the potentials within ourselves. In contrast, the other serves us to deepen our depth which is useful to correct the faults and the mistakes that we could easily make when evaluating our potentials, because it let us turn to backwards, so to speak, turn our attention to the past. Literature gives us such a breadth and depth. In other words, it serves a role as a mechanism to make us feel sympathy and reflection. Then, literary education could be one of the therapies healing the individual students and helping them to grow healthy. The therapist’s meeting to the patient through the medium of text compares to the teacher’s meeting to the students through the medium of literary text. The most important thing in both of them is the ability and the attitude of empathy. However, in the convention of literary education, there used to a tendency to emphasize the communal, social, and cognitive value than the individual, psychological and affective value. But, literary education of today should focus on the individual’s healing and development, and progress the relationship between students and teachers through the medium of literary texts as a preventivetherapy. During the process, we should gain the sympathy, acceptance, reflection, internalization, and self-realization. Those would be very helpful for some of our students heal their psychological and mental traumas, overcome the conflicts within their minds, and grow up healthy. Though we have still a lot of problem, literary education must take a good deal of interest in literary therapy. Both of literary education and therapy should go on with each other for actualizing the true sense of well being itself.