아동문학과 새로운 현실: 『이상한 나라의 앨리스』와 『피터의 기묘한 몽상』

Abstract

Children's literature is not only literature for children but also for the all, who would ‘see’ what children see. It leads us to explore the possibility which reality and dream are not estranged from each other but interrelated. And it suggests that once we get in someone else's body, or someone else's world we shall realize the world ought not to be defined and confined with our own limited knowledge. Such an aspect of children's literature alludes to what Michael Bell calls "modernist mythopoeia" in which knowledge and experience exist as part of each other and are, at least temporally, reconciled. Children's literature meets the double needs to provide both pleasure and morality through the crossing experience between reality and virtual reality, that is dream, which presupposes, in Bell's words, the realization of a curious "double consciousness of actually living a world-view as a world-view." Furthermore, it is a real genre in which "the aesthetic would not be seen as separate, available for the attentions of ideological critique," for the world represented in children's literature "is not just to be judged by an ideology, but "a means of judging the ideology." This essay proposes two very different British writers, Lewis Carroll and Ian McEwan, to demonstrate how children's literature works as a pool of identification and a means of judging ideology. Carroll's most famous and only fiction Alice stories include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which have been translated into almost all the world languages and numerously adapted into every possible kind of mediums of the modern world. One of the notable interpretations of Alice metaphor is The Matrix, of which the plot is triggered by the famous line, "follow the white rabbit" as Alice follows the White Rabbit to fall down the rabbit-hole. As for the latter Ian McEwan, who published so far a couple of children's books, Rose Blanche and The Daydreamer, his potential has been acclaimed to be both imaginative and moral. By reading these periodically and culturally different authors' works and adaptations, I aim to suggest that the most fundamental element in children's literature, regardless of the questions of diversity, race, class, age, and above all different modes of life, is to see as children see the world, and to identify and live with the new realities. In doing so, we shall acknowledge that children's literature is one of the major literary genres that modernist mythopoeia has been realized.