ABSTRACT
Any discussion of the literary canon is tied in with the study of literary history (Jauβ 1979) and here lies a major problem for the study of the literary canon in Indonesia. Indonesian literature is still young, many of its early activists are still alive and whatever the definition of its currently received canon and its contenders, their respective proponents continue to be deeply involved in the discussion of its merits and in the shaping of its nature, function, purpose. Most Indonesian literati are still far too close to and much too involved with the issues at stake as writers to make a ‘detached’ academic study a realistic proposition for them. In consequence, contemporary literary criticism is widely mistaken for academic analysis and historical study. The outlook hardly improves when one turns to studies produced by those less involved in the ongoing process as creative artists and who by and large tend to come from outside Indonesia. Meanwhile, the first genuine history of Indonesian literature worthy of this name still waits to be written. Despite the fact that some of the problems involved in writing a ‘proper’ literary history have been discussed (Foulcher 1968; Rosidi 1973; Teeuw 1986; Tickell 1987; Kratz 1991), so far there has been no history of Indonesian literature in the true sense of the word. What we have today are various kinds of surveys (Kratz 1996) as well as literary studies of individual authors or works, and of specific groups, movements and time frames which altogether have shaped the perception and the teaching of Indonesian literature in Indonesia today. These studies are informed by a considerable range of diverse literary and extra-literary concepts and dogmata, each shaped by their own ideological or literary agenda and each championing their own specific cause, as C. W. Watson (1973) remarked so pointedly more than twenty years ago when discussing the received interpretation of the novel Salab Asuhan.
