Textual Fragility and Literature Education(<Special Issue>The 57th JLA Convention (1st Day)
2003 Volume 52 Issue 3 Pages 26-37
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2003 Volume 52 Issue 3 Pages 26-37
When you treat a literary text in your class, you may think the interpretation you have made as teacher is the best one. Even when you democratically make your students discuss what the text means, you may sum up their more or less different readings into a single meaning and force it on all of them. But the text is so delicate and fragile that its meaning can be neither so easily fixed nor unified. If you believe in the only way of interpretation or in the meaning that can be shared by all readers, then you don't know the fragility of a literary text. When you realize it, you will face the text as if it were something unfamiliar and try hard to read it as it is. Thus in reviewing the role of literature education it is necessary to consider how to deal with such textual fragility in actual class.
