Theories of Literature REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

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CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter contains the description of the literature that is related to this study. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part is Review of Related Theories, which consists of the theory of literature critical approach. The second part contains a review of Chinese mythology, a general knowledge on the symbol of Bone and a review on Peking Man, continued with Theoretical Framework on the last part.

2.1 Theories of Literature

The theory used in this study is taken from the fields of Literature, which is Critical Approaches to Literature to assist the writer to analyze the manifestation of the meaning of symbol bone in conveying Chinese values. According to Rohrberger and Woods, there are five kind critical approaches to the literature. They are the formalist approach, the biographical approach, the sociocultural-historical approach, the mythopoeic approach, and psychological approach 3. The formalist approach concentrates on the importance to apprehend the total integrity of the literary work, so this kind of approach points out how the meaning of literary works is delivered from the structure itself 6-7. The biographical approach states that the necessity for an appreciation of the ideas, life background and personality of the author to dig the understanding of the literary objects. It can be said that this approach uses the biography of the author as the basic of the analysis 8. In the sociocultural-historical approach, the readers PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 10 analyze the literary work based on the civilization around the author when he made the story. So, in this approach the attitudes and actions at a specific group of people become the subject matter 9. The mythopoeic approach is used to discover certain universality recurrent patterns of human thought which are considered sharing the same universal belief to certain community mind. In general, the patterns include death and rebirth, guilt and sacrifices, and also primitive rites. The mystical relationship found in a story can be explained using this approach 11. The last approach is the psychological approach which involves the effort to locate and demonstrate certain recurrent patterns – that is psychology. This approach uses the theory of human psychology as the references to analyze the characters in a story. It asserts that each character’s behavior could be referred to the psychology of human beings. Through this approach, the character’s thought and behavior can be analyzed more deeply 13-14. The mythopoeic approach will be used to analyze The Bonesetters Daughter.

2.2 Reviews on Chinese Mythology: Bone and Peking Man