英文摘要 |
Riichi Yokomitsu's ”The Fly”(”Hae”) is constructed by combining a world made up of stories and a world of the story tellers themselves. The main characters include a peasant's wife whose son is about to die, a young couple who decide to run off, a country squire, a mother and a boy, a coachman and a female inn-keeper of a steamed-bun shop, and also a fly. These characters, each with a load on their minds, chance on the same (coach) depot and lead into four separate stories. In the end, these four sets of characters along with the carriage and the coachman all fall into a ravine resulting in a tragedy where no one survives. The tragic scene is completely caught by the fly with its gigantic eyes. Although the plots in the story are simple, what sorts of points-of-view should the students adopt in a classroom setting when reading this story is the challenge. This paper is takes the ”Contemporary Japanese Fiction Course” for juniors in our Japanese Language and Culture Department as an example to discuss how ”The Fly” should be read from a literary education perspective.This paper argues that the instructor of this course should have a clear understanding of the diverse ways and means in reading/interpretation as well as the cultural expressions/symbolism embedded in the literary prose. Moreover, he/she has to respect the ”dialogue” between the students (readers) and the novel in hopes of increasing their potential of literary interpretation. As the first step, the instructor should talk about the gist of the story paragraph by paragraph, and then scrutinize the relationships between characters and incidents in an analytical manner. Students should act as readers and try to lose themselves in the story to certain degree; living in the same world of those characters. |