Benefits of the Study
Mary Rohrberger and Samuel H. Woods, in their book Reading and Writing about Literature 1995 state that to have a reasonable judgment, we need to employ a
means which is called a critical approach. In short, we can say that it brings us to a better understanding of its nature, function, and positive values. Rohrberger and
Woods present five approaches to analyze a novel. These approaches are used in order to understand the positive aesthetic values of literary work. These approaches are the
formalist approach, the biographical approach, the sociocultural-historical approach, the mythopoeic approach, and the psychological approach 6-19.
The first approach is the formalist approach. This approach tries to examine the literature work about reference to the fact of the author’s life without reference to
the genre of the work or its place in development of the genre or in literary history, and without reference to its social milieu. This criticism emphasizes merely on the
work of literature itself and its esthetic meanings. It regards literature as “a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its own terms”. It means that
all elements necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself. Its main goal is to determine how such elements work together with the text’s
content to shape its effects upon readers 7. The second approach is the biographical approach; this approach leads the
reader to try to learn as much as they can about the author’s life and the development of the author. This knowledge is applied to understand the writings because the
proponents of this approach demands that a work of art is a reflection of a personality 9. The third approach is the sociocultural-historical approach which takes us to
analyze a novel based on the civilization that produces the novel. Civilization is PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
defined as the attitudes and actions of a specific group of people. The subject matter of the novel itself is those attitudes and actions 12.
The last two approaches are the mythopoeic and the psychological approach. Based on the mythopoeic approach, the readers will be able to analyze a novel by
trying to discover certain universally recurrent patterns or a human thought. The universally recurrent pattern are those that found first expression in ancient myth and
folk rites and are also basic to human thought that they have meaning for all men 15. Then the last approach is the psychological approach, which is an approach that
brings the readers to analyze the novel from the psychological point of view of human beings. Freud’s theory about human is used to analyze the characters in a novel 18.