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REVISITING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER in Literature and Language A Collection of A.B. Sri Mulyani, Ph.D.’s Articles Editors: Diksita Galuh Nirwinastu Arina Isti’anah Hirmawan Wijanarka REVISITING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER in Literature and Language A Collection of A.B. Sri Mulyani, Ph.D.’s Articles Editors: Diksita Galuh Nirwinastu Arina Isti'anah Hirmawan Wijanarka Penerbit: Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma i REVISITING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER in Literature and Language A Collection of A.B. Sri Mulyani, Ph.D.’s Articles Hak Cipta © 2020 Prodi Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra Universitas Sanata Dharma, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Diterbitkan oleh Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma Jl. Affandi, Mrican Yogyakarta 55281 Telp. (0274) 513301, 515253 Cetakan pertama 2020 xii, 303 pages; 148 x 210 mm ISBN 978-623-7601-09-8 Hak cipta dilindungi Undang-Undang (UU No. 19 Tahun 2002) Barangsiapa dengan sengaja dan tanpa hak melakukan perbuatan sebagaimana dimaksud dalam Pasal 2 ayat (1) atau Pasal 49 ayat (1) dan ayat (2) dipidana dengan pidana penjara masing-masing paling singkat 1 (satu) bulan dan/ atau denda paling sedikit Rp. 1.000.000,00 (satu juta rupiah), atau pidana denda paling banyak Rp. 5.000.000.000,00 (lima miliar rupiah). ii PREFACE This book is a personal and professional record of my struggles as a young researcher in the 1990s to my recent works and research interests in the 2000s as a senior researcher at the English Department of Sanata Dharma University. In light of time, my academic journey does indeed span in two different centuries; accordingly, it also informs the diversity and dynamic of topics, genres, and critical theories employed in my works. Throughout my research, I have explored different kinds of literary genres, particularly those three traditional ones: prose, drama, and verse; however, this book mainly displays only the prose selection. The prose analyzed in this book includes fiction prose such as short stories and novels as well as non-fiction prose such as letters, diaries, and autobiographies. In addition, it also has one selection of film that today has already become an acceptable research object in English Literature and Language studies. This book provides two different perspectives in its development. On one hand in its early works, as the academic products of a young researcher and an absolute beginner, some articles in this book provide simple yet confident working theories with straightforward and uncomplicated applications in researching literature with sample discussions and analysis. On the other hand, as the works of a senior researcher who struggles with recent critical theories, some later articles have attempted to problematize the complexity of literature within its aesthetic and political dimension (although not without skeptical mind and eyes) by focusing on the intersectionality of race, class, and gender with its each specificity and heterogeneity. Therefore, upon the publication of this book, the readership I have in mind, is young and beginner researchers who struggle to do the academic research in language and literature, who will have to travel the long and winding roads but eventually will also discover their personal and iii professional destinations. If I can do it as displayed in this book, they certainly will do better at it in their own pace and time. Gratitude and thanks are due to all my senior and junior colleagues for their supports, contributions, feedbacks, and mentoring throughout my career at the English Department of Sanata Dharma. Particular thanks to Hirmawan Wijanarka, the Chair of our English Department, who also edits and initiates the publication of this book; and also Arina Istianah and Diksita Galuh Nirwastu as the co-editors of this book. This book is dedicated to the loving memory of A. Aryanto and F.X. Siswadi. iv INTRODUCTION: REVISTING RACE, CLASS AND GENDER My first serious attempt at academic writing is undoubtedly my undergraduate thesis: A Stylistic Study on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Selected Poems. I completed it in 1993 to obtain my B.A. degree in English from Sebelas Maret University. It is a quite simple work, but to this day I still consider it as my academic masterpiece. It is a labour of love that also reflects my literary trainings and provides me with a space to negotiate two opposite literary perspectives that I have learned from the beginning to my recent research interests today: the traditional battle of intrinsic v. extrinsic approaches in literature. The stylistic approach that I employ in my undergraduate thesis also encourages me to have a better comprehensive linguistic knowledge to gain a more critical and insightful literary analysis. Today as a researcher, I still frequently confront this intrinsic-extrinsic dilemma in my works. As time goes by, fortunately, the dynamic of recent critical theories allow me more possibilities and flexibility to conduct literary research with its intertexuality and intersectionality into diverse research topics and areas. Hence, the title of this book “Revisiting Race, Class and Gender in Literature and Language” befits my struggles and academic journey to contextualize race, class and gender in its specificity and heterogeneity in researching language and literature. My research interests in race, class, and gender are previously displayed through the simple traditional biographical approaches that often simplistically connect the text to the life and psychology of the authors and their socio-historical backgrounds. Even after more rigid trainings in practical criticism and structuralism of the day during my undergraduate study, I still frequently deploy these traditional biographical perspectives in somewhat covert strategies into the so- called genetic structuralism, attempting to connect the genesis of the text to the authorial aspects to include psychological, sociological, and historical backgrounds. This critical turn can be seen in the first article v of this book in the way I analyze E.M. Forster’s “The Life to Come” in genetic structural views. In addition, at different stages of my study, I have also analyzed the same text by employing various perspectives such as Marxism, Post-Colonialism, and even addressing ecocritic concerns although not yet too pronounced. Only after a long period of thinking and rethinking, now I care less about this intrinsic-extrinsic polarity, and instead I learn more about both the politic of language and the politic of writing. Not only researching literature and language in the Horatian Ars Poetica and its dulce et utile aspects, but I also intend to scrutinize it more in its relation to the aesthetic politic to articulate the voice and the struggles of minority groups (of race/ethnicity, class, and gender) in language and literature. In my later works, I pay more attention to the politic of language and identities in literature, unveiling the key role of literature and language as the arena of power struggles. In my works, I highlight the awareness and knowledge that language and literature are already ideological as Mikhail Bakhtin observed in “sociological poetics” that “narrative technique not simply as a product of ideology but ideology itself” (in Lanser, 1992: 5). Furthermore, Bakhtin also asserted that literary form itself or genre is a socio-historical and also a formal entity, therefore, transformations in genre must be considered in relation to social changes (in Todorov, 1984:80). This notion of literature and its very form and language as ideology and ideological leads me to venture feminist theories and gender struggles. I begin to embark on the area of narratology, particularly the feminist narratology and feminist poetics in the light of gender and genre relation. Absorbing into the historical production of genres, I finally learn how literary genre is also the product of patriarchal domination that marginalizes women from participating in particular literary ventures. I learn to understand how traditionally women have to be “content” to express their ideas and experience in their assigned private spheres in epistolary genre before finally given the opportunity to write novel as their assigned feminine genre and writing space. Regardless of the limited sphere and writing vi opportunities, women throughout the western literary history, still manage to speak their minds even in a very limited way and form such as illustrated by Woolf in narrating Osborne’s struggle in articulating her voice. Had she been born in 1827, Dorothy Osborne would have written novels; had she been born in 1527, she would never have written at all. But she was born in 1627, and at that date though writing books was ridiculous for a woman there was nothing unseemingly in writing a letter. And so by degrees the silence is broken … (Virginia Woolf, 1935). Osborne’s letters do indeed display how a writing form and genre can be both the space of oppression and liberation. Women can eventually speak their minds and amplify their voice even in the very oppressive form and space. The resurrection of epistolary forms by modern authors such as Bell Hooks with her memoirs, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) and Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997); Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996); and Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982) to name a few are a genre homage to their literary mothers who have paved the path for them into the established literary production under the patriarchal domination. Thus, it also follows Bakhtin and Lanser’s views who observe that narrative voice, situated at the juncture of “social position and literary practice,” embodies the social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced (1992: 5). Befittingly, my preoccupation with feminist narratology enables me to exercise diverse strategies and various perspectives of Structuralism, Post- Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, and Post-colonialism to explore the pluralicity and multiplicity of identities and its power interplay in language and literature.