『한밤중 개에게 일어난 일』에 나타난 실존적 교육의 의미

초록

This study explores the meaning of education through close reading and analyzing a fiction, Mark Hadden’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Alongside this, the paper is to critically review genres of traditional bildungsroman and contemporary coming-of-age fiction. Traditionally, bildungsroman has centered on the issues of growing-up, education, and formation of humanity. As a contemporary version of bildungsroman, coming-of-age novels has a similar objectivity—narrative of growing-up in (post)modern world. This paper delves into this historical literary venue in light of philosophy, especially existentialism and ethics. As theoretical scaffoldings, the paper utilizes a methodological concept, meta-pedagogy. Meta-pedagogy is a theoretical lens to analyze literature critically revealing the structural connectivity between philosophy, literature, and education. To substantiate this methodology, the paper employes Maxin Green’s existential meaning of education. Mark Hadden’s novel ingenuously scrutinizes Christopher, an autistic child’s idiosyncratic consciousness and his para-detective odyssey to find answers to the more fundamental questions such as ‘who he is,’ ‘how he can survive,’ etc. Through visiting this enclosed consciousness, people around him and readers will gain the meaning of education and existential ethics via meta-padagogical questions this fiction cleverly, timely, and heartedly casts.

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