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Interdisciplinary Approach in Teaching Korean Literature: Deciphering the Cultural Code Underlying the Texts
It is obvious that no study of literature can be done in isolation from other disciplines, especially social sciences. Discussing the literary text in the class involves contextualizing it, telling about its author, the historical period it was written in or about, the philosophical thoughts and socio-political climate of that period, etc. Depending on the dominant themes in the text, the literature teacher delves into aspects of history, philosophy, psychology and science. In Moscow State Linguistic University we teach future translators who should not only read and understand but also translate literary texts correctly from Korean into Russian, and the very important thing our students should be acquainted with is the cultural code underlying the literary texts in Korean. We also must take into consideration the differences between Korean and Russian cultural codes as well as between South Korean and North Korean ones.
First of all we should say that the concept of “cultural code” itself is a matter of discussion. The term “code” as used in semiotics evinces a fundamental ambiguity inherited from the lexical meaning of the word. R. Jacobson was one of the first semioticians to adopt the term “code” from communication theory. In 1953 reflecting on the correlation between culture and language he declared: “The most essential problem for speech analysis is that of the code common to both sender and receiver and underlying the exchange of messages”. Developing this thought Eco stated that communication, including the processes of “signification” and “interpretation”, is made possible by the existence of codes.
For working interpreters (translators) and language & literature teachers it would be logical to understand “cultural code” as a multilevel dynamic system letting to see, interpret and translate into other languages the meaning inherent in the message addressed to the carrier of such a code. As the levels available for familiarization to the non-carriers of the code could be identified: 1) the common knowledge about the world, including natural objects and cultural objects, 2) the mentality as a way of perceiving the world and ourselves in it on the basis of some values and what else, 3) the linguistic picture of the world implying the existence of certain “concepts”, 4) the involvement into various discourses 5) collective memory, etc. So it becomes clear that the condition for more or less complete understanding of the text of the foreign cultural code is primarily the widening of the interpreter’s “semantic horizon” (the term by G. Gadamer) up to the extent in which it can “fuse” with the “semantic horizon” of the text. The identification of the above-mentioned levels and the connections between them turned out to be very intricate task itself.
In the presentation I am going to show how we work with our students at deciphering Korean cultural code when reading and translating prosaic and highly metaphorical poetic texts, giving as examples some passages from the texts which are remarkable in terms of implicit content.