A Study on the Ethical Relations of Literary Education

Literary education has to deal with the many aspects of the value system of literature. The literary education to date, however, has been narrow in its scope in that it has only focused on the aesthetic function and the formal structures of literature. This paper attempts to identify how the ethical values and aesthetic values are interrelated in the process of literary education. The purposes of literary education are to develop the students' imaginative faculty, to develop their total understanding of life, and to cultivate a literary culture. These purposes of literary education are closely related with ethics in many ways. Furthermore, the nature of literature itself has various ethical aspects. The materializing power is an important aspect of literature. Literary education, therefore, should explore the possibility of combining the materializational aspect of literature and the ethics of life. There are several ways to materialize the ethical elements of literature. In lyrics, the subject and the object are melt to become higher-level beings. This is made possible by the use of metaphors that are transformed into the representations of ethics. In epical genres, like novel, the multiple subjects are put in the situations of conflict and contradiction. In the processes of literary communication, the ethical perspectives contribute to the building of a utopia. This attribute of utopia-orientation is the ethical aspect of the epical literature. The ultimate goal of literature education should be to produce a whole person equipped with the aesthetic sensitivity and ethical perspectives. To this end, the relationships between literature and ethics need to be constantly reviewed and reexamined.이 논문은 서울대학교 사범대학 연구지원비에 의해 이루어진 것입니다