프로스페로의 교육, 캘리반의 언어

초록

Recent scholarship on The Tempest tends to regard Caliban as a case of educational failure. Its explicit and implicit premise is that Prospero is an admirable teacher with a well-intentioned educational purpose while Caliban is morally too degenerated to absorb his teaching. I problematize that premise by foregrounding the political implication of Prospero’s language education and Caliban’s exceptional linguistic talent. The nature of the language instruction Caliban got from Prospero has been frequently overdetermined. The ultimate purpose of Prospero’s education was not to civilize Caliban but to make his word heard to the islander. Since survival and regaining political power are his top priorities, Prospero not only suppresses Caliban’s mother tongue and legitimate claim for the island but also exploits his labor, mercilessly curbing his potential and practical recalcitrancy with magic. Caliban’s new language, however, serves as more than a tool of communication. Prospero’s words and behavior have unwittingly awakened political consciousness in the once apolitical and egalitarian Caliban. Though Caliban is nothing more than an incorrigible bitter student and servant in the eyes of Prospero, he has not merely mastered the target language but also taught himself to broaden the horizons of his being, demonstrating the compelling sensitivity of poetic imagination. This is a quality that Prospero never noticed and thus never appreciated. Caliban’s rhetorical eloquence might be credited to Prospero’s, but Caliban’s poetic genius is not of external origins. It was his property from the beginning, a property that cannot be dispossessed even by the powerful magic of Prospero.

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