성장 서사와 인권의 앙상블 -2018~2022년 뉴베리상 수상작을 중심으로-

Abstract

The growth narrative, which depicts an immature protagonist's journey of exploration through various growth pains and reborn as a mature being, inevitably entails human rights issues in the process of thinking about the relationship between the subject and others and the meaning of the community. This paper examines the human rights issues reflected in the growth narratives of the Newbery Award-winning books translated into Korea over the past five years. The five Newbery Medal winners have something in common in that the authors are all ethnic Americans and that the author's racial identity is reflected in the characters. Although characters without presence like invisible humans reveal problems of discrimination prevalent in American society, the minority identity of the characters serves as the basis for completing the growth story as a network that imagines individuals in the community, not as individualistic myths. This paper focuses on the magical power of stories that form a network of relationships and exert the imagination of empathy. The subject of the story commonly borrowed by the Newbery Award winners becomes a literary device that makes the main characters reflect on the human position that exists in relationships, find out the value of non-existence, and understand the nature of life. The Newbery Award- winning books talk about the ethics of literature and even human ethics, narrating the reality that individuals, institutions, and specific reality contexts are intertwined as "Chronotopes on the threshold."