Pemahaman dan Penerapan Sosiologi Sastera dalam Sastera Melayu Moden

The concept of sociology of literature in Malay literature in the main is divided into three main categories of understanding and application. The first category - based on the assumption that literature is both ahistorical and asocial - sees a critical study as necessarily confined to scrutinising the literary text only and to highlighting the fictive world evoked in the text studied. To the extent that it restricts itself to the social world in the text, this approach is not dissimilar to the intrinsic method so favoured by Malay critics. The second category, premised on the existence of a significant relationship between a text and its context, strives to highlight the dynamics between the two, especially the influence of the latter on the content and form of the finished work. The third category, similarly persuaded, nevertheless sees the need to locate a literary text within a particular paradigm to best understand the social preoccupations that it addresses. Comparatively speaking, the first category dominates the Malay literary world and serves as its “knowledge” of what constitutes sociology of literature and its application in critical studies.