This study aims to investigate the post-war narratives created against the backdrop of the wars in the late Joseon Dynasty, focusing on historical sensitivity, and to design the contents and methods of post-war narrative education centered on historic...
This study aims to investigate the post-war narratives created against the backdrop of the wars in the late Joseon Dynasty, focusing on historical sensitivity, and to design the contents and methods of post-war narrative education centered on historical sensitivity. The term ‘historical sensitivity’ refers to a cognitive attitude that seeks to understand events or institutions recorded in historical documents while sensing the lives and sensibilities of the people who existed behind them. While this term was used by the historian Marc Bloch, the critical awareness of capturing human experience and emotion within the gaps of records has been consistently proposed in the field of literary education.
The historical sensitivity defined in this study is based on the concept of sensibility. Sensibility is a layer of sensory knowing that involves judgment yet cannot be reduced to conceptual language, encompassing a cognitive structure where perception and reaction to the world can expand into the performance of discernment, criticism, and interpretation. Since such sensibility is a mode of preserving and evoking individuality and specificity that are easily lost in the process of abstraction, it deeply aligns with the essence of literary education and can be called a core cognitive competency required of contemporary learners today. Based on this, this study defines historical sensitivity as the ability to go beyond the meaning revealed on the surface of literary works and capture even the latent layers of perception and sense beneath them. In narratives, historical sensitivity manifests as (1)the loss and supplementation of experience through the selection of narrative elements (2)insight into the life of the times mediated by narrative devices (3)the reconstruction of historical awareness through the transformation of causality.
In this study, it was judged that post-war narratives reveal historical sensitivity most clearly in that war is an event experienced as extreme chaos and irrationality. Accordingly, this study targets the historical sensitivity revealed in the post-war narratives of the late Joseon Dynasty, and among them, selected Gangro-jeon, Choecheok-jeon, Gangdo Mongyu-rok, and Bakssi-jeon. Although these four works are set against the backdrop of the wars, the ways they narrativize the memory of the wars are different, and the unique historical sensitivity of each work is revealed therein.
Gangro-jeon centers on the real-life figure Gang, Hong-rip and contains the confusion and conflict felt by the people of the time regarding the chaotic situation of the Joseon army at the Battle of Simha and the government's response to the Jeongmyo Treaty. In particular, the motifs of ‘secret orders’ and ‘rumors’ exist in historical records, but their authenticity is unclear, still arousing questions. By using those materials as motifs, Gangro-jeon conveys the questions and confusion of the people of that time. Through this, Gangro-jeon reveals a historical sensitivity regarding the indeterminacy of historical judgment. Choecheok-jeon discovers new possibilities of exchange and solidarity in East Asia through the narrative surrounding the reunion of the Choecheok couple separated by the war. Through this, the work discovers the sustainability of life even in the midst of a huge event called war and reveals another possibility of life not captured in historical records as historical sensitivity.
Gangdo Mongyu-rok borrows the motif of a dream to call the women who committed suicide in Gangdo as wandering spirits, and through their utterances, reveals the pain of those recorded in historical records merely as someone's wife. This work is similar to historical records, but reveals a historical sensitivity that criticizes the bias of historical records by retelling the records from the perspective of the dead. Bakssi-jeon contains the perceptions and senses of the people of the time who tried to understand and break through the situation even after suffering the miserable defeat of the war. This is revealed through the motif of Taoist magic to attempt a reversal of the war's results, but within the social constraints faced by Lady Bak, that result fails to lead to an actual victory in reality and reveals the threshold of history that cannot be crossed even with literary imagination to the people of the time. This shows an attempt to overcome the despair of reality through literature in the face of the historical reality of having to send numerous prisoners to the enemy country after the defeat at Namhansanseong, thus showing the future-oriented character of literature among historical sensitivities most well.
Based on the work analysis, Chapter 4 presented the goals, contents, and methods of post-war narrative education in the late Joseon Dynasty centered on historical sensitivity. Historical sensitivity education aims for in-depth appreciation of post-war narratives, enhancement of critical literacy, and cultivation of citizenship. Among them, in-depth appreciation of post-war narratives corresponds to the goal of literary education, and enhancement of critical literacy and cultivation of citizenship are goals applied not only to literary education but also to all subjects that utilize post-war narratives. Through this, the possibility of expanding post-war narrative education was examined. The educational contents consisted of sensing gaps through the juxtaposition of historical records and narratives, identifying the way experiences are organized through motifs, and reading narrative and political positions appearing in causal transformation, and centered on these, specific questions that can be utilized in actual education were presented.
As classical literature education, post-war narrative education aims to go beyond consuming works as old stories or knowledge and to cultivate the sensitivity of the people of the time contained in those works. This study is significant in that it materialized the sensitivity of post-war narratives into a form capable of practical implementation.