A Road Map into Literary Research
Method
Subur Wardoyo
Two major problems encountered by ELT-major students
doing research in literature are the unavailability of a research proposal
guideline that is literature-friendly and the difficulty in finding a research
topic that has not been extensively done elsewhere. This chapter suggests an
effective literary research method to find a way through the problems. It
presents several condensed literary theories for a practical, ready-for-use
roadmap of how to do a formalistic, structuralistic,
deconstructive, psychological, or feministic analysis. Sterne's,
Ingarden's, and Iser's close reading (the formalist’s practice
of “data collection” in literary theory) and an examination of different
literary theories (as a type of “data analysis” in literary theory) were
undertaken to provide a multiple perspective analysis of Li-Young Lee's poetry.
The work of Lee, a prominent American poet of Indonesian birth, is presented as
an example of a research topic that is relatively fresh. Furthermore, it makes
good sense for Asians to conduct research on Asian-American writers as this
research area is relatively unexplored. It is believed that Asian researchers
can contribute to the field since they are culturally well qualified to trace
the roots of Asian-American.
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Wardoyo, S. (2004). A
road map into literary research method. In B. Y. Cahyono
& U. Widiati (Eds.), The
tapestry of English language teaching and learning in
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