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Please read the following texts:
Course Pack
Other
This is a long novel, so put some time aside to read it.
We'll first look at this: it'll be useful if you have reviewed the requirements for the proposal and final essay, and have thought a little about what you might like to write on. We'll also think about some basic questions: the purpose of a research article, and the manner in which research works as a process. We'll think about this by reading an article that I published a few of years ago: think in advance about the following questions.
1. What is the purpose of a research article in Literary Studies?
2. What features does a research article have, and how do they contribute to an overall effect?
3. In what ways, if any, do you think a research essay for a graduate class might be different from an article published in a refereed journal?
4. Research is a process. What steps do you normally follow in writing a research paper? Where, if anywhere, do you run into difficulties?
We'll next look at the novel itself. In this, our first week, I'd like to think more about the content of the text, and the time it is set, and less about Pramoedya itself, the time it was written, and the particular formal devices used by the author. Of course it's impossible to absolutely ignore this second set of issues, since they are intertwined with the first. However, it may be useful to think about some of the issues that we encountered in Weeks 2 and 3 of the module with reference to Pramoedya's novel:
We'll also be adding one more component to this towards the end of the class: Benedict Anderson's famous notion of the nation as "imagined community," and in particular how this imagining is enabled by two forms of print capitalism, the novel and the newspaper. Below are some observations on the novel itself, and then on Anderson's article.
Footsteps
You may initially find the novel’s detailed reference to characters you don’t know and a plethora of historical events confusing. I’ve added to your confusion here by choosing the third of four novels in Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet. My reason for doing so is because this novel describes Minke’s movement out from the confines of Surabaya into Batavia (present day Jakarta), from anti-colonial resistance in a household and its environs into awakening nationalism in a whole society. Even if you don’t know the context, I think the novel’s very readable if you concentrate on the conflicts that Minke goes through. However, in the interests of comprehension, here are two contexts.
In the preceding two volumes of the Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations, we follow Minke through adolescence, and his rejection of the hierarchical nature of traditional Javanese society and his own father’s acquiescence to Dutch colonial authority. We see his friendship with Nyai Ontorosoh, a concubine of a Dutch man who has asserted her autonomy and taken over his household on his decline and death. While we don’t meet Nyai Ontorosh in the first hundred pages of Footsteps, she will appear later in the novel as Minke’s “Mama” (as distinct from his mother). Minke marries her daughter, Annelies, who is the subject of the painting which Minke is so protective about in the early part of Footsteps. Because Annelies is legally her father’s family’s property, the marriage is disallowed, and she is forced to go to the Netherlands, where she dies: her struggle to be with her husband is widely discussed in the press and is perhaps an event which precipitates the formation of a national consciousness in the Indies. Minke also comes to know the Chinese activist Khouw Ah Soe (Pramoedya was very interested in the Chinese presence in Indonesia and wrote a major historical study of their placer in the Indonesian nation) and, on his violent death, is charged with delivering a note to a friend of his in Batavia. This leads to the meeting with Ang Sang Mei.
If you’re puzzled by Minke’s name, it is actually given to him by a Dutch teacher, and is an attempt to pronounce the English word “monkey.” It’s thus an insult which the character redefines—Pramoedya is very conscious of the mythological characters in the wayang kulit (shadow theatre), one of whom is the monkey god Hanuman.
Our second context is historical. The external elements of
Minke’s life are very closely modeled on that of early nationalist Tirto Adi
Suryo. The attached Adobe Acrobat File
will give
you some sense of the historical perspective within which the events of the
novel are embedded.
Footsteps is an extraordinarily rich text. The various notions of what it means to be modern put forward by Ang San Mei, the girl from Jepara, van Kollewijn, and of course Minke himself are clearly important. Moving out from the discussions outlined above, you might also be interested in STOVIA as an educational institution, the city space of Batavia as a “theatre of modernity,” and the way in which women and gender relations become inscribed in the text. One of Pramoedya’s avowed intentions in writing the Buru Quartet was to revisit and review history—one of the most impressive elements of the text to me is how the novel illustrates, from the inside, how painfully difficult the process of imagining a national community—something we all now take for granted—was under colonialism.
You may well be familiar with Anderson's famous--and often misrepresented--account of nations as "imagined communities." In this section of Imagined Communities, Anderson is trying to plot the transition to modern conceptions of community and social space by considering the crucial role of what he calls "print capitalism," represented in his account by the twin products of the novel and the newspaper. Here are a checklist of elements to explore and think over. If possible try to draw examples--or counter-examples--from your own experiences:
While Anderson doesn't specifically address the issue of colonialism here, it is interesting that the most prolonged close readings of novels that he gives are from the beginnings of national consciousness in the Philippines and Indonesia, colonies of Spain and Holland respectively. Does colonialism make a difference to Anderson's story of nationalism?
Last updated: 26 August, 2008