CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
The chapter below details with
the background of the study, statements of the problems, objectives of the
study, scope and limitation of the study, significance of the study, research
method, and definition of key terms.
1.1 Background of the Study It is
a matter of fact that human beings naturally love beauty and good values in
life. That is why, they like to either create or read literary works that mostly
represent real life and teach good values as well. Reading literary work is not
only for the sake of entertainment since it may also broaden the reader’s general
knowledge. Literary work can be criticized using some approaches; one of the
approaches that commonly used to criticize is sociological approach.
The same idea that sociology or
other branches of science that do not belong directly to literature can be used
as approaches toward literary work had been stated by Zainuddin Fananie in his
book, Telaah Sastra. He wrote, if we are willing to perform literary criticism,
it means we cannot just summarize or make excerpt of the literary work using
any global comments, yet we should observe the literary work based on various
aspects and dimensions. Those aspects can be derived from literary theory, even
so the use of other different science approaches, such as philosophy,
sociology, religion, psychology, technology, and so on are acceptable
(Fanannie, 2002: 64).
1 Sociological criticism is one of the ways to
analyze literary work that focused on the human beings’ problem in society
since literary work frequently expresses human beings’ struggle to determine
their future based on imagination, feeling and also intuition. This opinion
gives us clear description that human’s never ending struggle will always be
portrayed in literary work. Besides, according to Goldmann (in Endraswara,
2003: 79) the human’s never ending struggle has three basic characteristics as
follows: a tendency of human being to adapt himself to the environment in order
to be rationalistic and significant in the correlation with his environment, a
propensity to the coherence in the global process, and automatically he has
dynamic character and tendency to reform structure even though he himself is
the part of the structure. In other words, it explores the idea or values a
literary work tries to deliver, because literary work is medium for people to
learn and teach, the way people say, hear, and see a real life.
In the end, it will guide them to
see the world wisely.
Moreover, Fananie stated that
sociology is study of human’s social activity. Literary work is work of art
that shows human’s life expression (2002: 132). In addition, sociological
criticism is a research that perceives literary work from its sociological
aspect.
Sociological criticism and
literature are different but completing each other. In this case, they have
very close relationship because literature is a reflection of socio-cultural
environment which is a dialectic text between the author and the social
condition. In accordance with this view, a successful literary work is that can reflect, just like a mirror,
a social condition at the time the work being made.
Basically, according to Laurenson
and Swingewood (1971) at least three perspectives can be found related to
sociological criticism. The first is perspective that sees literary works as
social document that reflects the condition of the time literary works are
written. Second, perspective that reflects social condition of the author; and
the last is perspective that sees literary works as the model or manifestation
of the historical events or the socio-cultural condition.
The three perspectives above are
likely to stand alone. Nevertheless, we may look for one by one as the
different things or find them altogether while doing a sociological criticism.
It depends much on the capacity of the researcher himself to use just one or
all of them. The more complete perspectives we used, the more complete our
understanding will be. However, the thing we have to consider is the aim for
doing research. For the reason to find out the history fact of Armenian society
that lived in America in the past, the researcher feels the right choice is to
use the third perspective. It is alike to what Elizabeth and Ton Burn (1973)
said that literary works are indeed often bound to the special moments in the
history of society (Endraswara, 2003: 79).
As we know, there are more than
one kind of literary work and will be countless if we mention one by one based
on their genres, they can be easily classified into poetry, prose, and drama.
Here, the researcher chooses one genre to focus on the analysis, that is,
drama, especially a drama under the title The Man with the Heart in the
Highlands written by William Saroyan, the first American writer who won both The Drama Critic’s Circle
Award and the Pulitzer Prize, for his play, The Time of Your Life. William
Stonehill Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, on Monday, August st , 1908. He was the th child of Armenian immigrants, Armenak
Saroyan, preacher and poet, and his wife Takoohie, of Bitlis (Liukkonen &
Pesonen, 2008).
In relation to William Saroyan,
on the online article “William Saroyan 1908-1981 - introduction” (Anonymous,
2010, para.1) states more information about his biography: William Saroyan is
one of the most prolific writers in the United States; he is best remembered
for such works as The Time of Your Life and My Heart's in the Highlands (1939),
plays that reflected Saroyan’s vision of life in the United States, permeated
with the perspective he had on America as an immigrant of Armenian heritage. He
wrote over two hundred plays in his lifetime, in addition to numerous short
stories, novels, and three autobiographies. Many of his plays were never
published or produced during his lifetime, although he did achieve both
critical and commercial success for his work during the 1930s and 1940s.
Characterized by many scholars as
a maverick, He is known for the free style and intensely autobiographical
elements of his works. He drew heavily on his own life experiences for the
subject matter of his plays and short fiction, and his tendency to present a
uniquely personal vision of humanity in his writing has led many critics to
disregard his work as sentimental and superficial. Regardless, at the height of
his popularity, Saroyan’s work met with great success, and he won both the New
York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting for The Time
of Your Life. More recent appraisals of Saroyan’s works have been more
receptive to the quality of his writing and the significance of his themes, especially
in relation to his depiction of immigrant experiences in America.
The drama is comedy with a single
act and six scenes telling about Ben Alexander, an unlucky Armenian-American
poet with his small family that consists of his mother and Johnny, his six-year-old
son and Jasper Macgregor, their bugler vagabond friend alias the man with the
heart in the Highlands, as the author
gave him the phrasal name in the drama. They are all actually suffering from
poverty but still trying to live in an optimistic way. It is somewhat sentimental
work which had ever been produced in America while the super power country was
still in the shadows and nightmare of World War. The story celebrates optimism
in the middle of trials and difficulties of the Depression-era.
'>
PMLA journal Vol. 97, “The heroine’s allegedly
indelicate, immoral, and illegal activities are emancipations and illuminations of a burgeoning patriarchal
capitalist community-or anticommunitythe novel’s main object of concern” (http://www.jstor.org/action/matriarchal.miror:woman.capital.in.moll.flanders.
2188.htm) This novel describes
the struggle of woman belonging to lower class against the culture which is oppressing women. One of main character,
Moll, is imaged as a strong and beautiful woman. Defoe described Moll as a
gorgeous figure who used her beauty to
get men with lofty income. She has a strong desire that she can change her life to be much better.
Novel in th and th
century tended to be realistic because the novel described a character and
ordinary occupations in relatively familiar setting.
“ Moreover, as I will soon
suggest more fully, novels of this period often reflect in recognizable ways the assumption
and disturbance of the society from
which they emanate. The facts of the world we inhabit measure reality of the most us, and eighteen-century
fiction frequently draws on facts of
experience. Yet to call it realistic for these reasons requires ignoring a
great deal that it also does; for instance, the degree to which it relies on palpable artifice, trades in wish
fulfillment, and depends on plotting
that is too neat to correspond to the course of actual lives.” (Spacks, 2006: 3) In the eighteenth century,
novel was considerable having ways of developing
by unpredictable hints. In this period, some novelists showed new interest in describing psychological
experience and the social world. On the other hand, some argued that based on the
techniques, the novel described about satire, though, crucial, also sentimentalism, and
almost all presented plots answering more
to desire than plausibility. The realistic term used at that time was related
to their attention on the social
problems and implications of social class and their effort to investigate psychological depth. The
topic used in this era was gender, family,
and household which focused on norms and controversies of England in th century. “In 1957 Ian Watt declared
“formal realism” to be the crucial characteristic
of the eighteenth-century English novel, citing Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding as principal cases in point and
ignoring a large number of less conspicuous
novelists.” (Spacks, 2006:3) According to Watt in the Novel Beginnings
Experiments in EighteenthCentury English Fiction, the rise of the novel argued
the importance of the novel of a new
social class and of inquiries into social force bearing on the novel developments. “Literary situation reflected
actualities of society at large.” (Spacks, 2006:6) The writer’s theme is
usually about men and women of the upper
class, and aristocrats. In eighteenth century, there are much fiction dealing with prostitution or politics, confinement or
adventure, untrammeled lawbreaking or
trammeled domesticity. It almost makes money becomes the most component of the plot.
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