Multimedia sensibility has spawned new trends in literary works, which is postmodern trend. As a product of sensibility, literary works are no longer a closed text complete in itself, but rather a text that is open and opening up, which is co-extensive with everything that exists outside of it, whether in the form of images of different senses, with other texts, genres, discourses, as well as with the historical real world.
"Such disclosure is not a disclosure which is spatial, static, and final, but temporal, dynamic, and processing. In this case, the finality of a work does not lie on ‘being there’, availability and existence objectively, but on its involvement in processes of aesthetic, cultural, social, political, and even economic in particular space and time,” said Prof. Dr. Faruk, S.U. at Senate Hall on Wednesday (9/3) when inaugurated as Professor of Faculty of Cultural Sciences UGM.
Ontologically, the works of postmodern literature are works which present themselves in such a way as an open discursive and historical process, not something which is final. With that existence, according to Faruk, literature is challenged to find the methodological tools that can capture and understand the process, dynamics, change and variation, not something static, fixed, invariant. "Actually, the answer to this challenge is easy to say, but difficult to implement," he said.
In Faruk’s opinion, the difficulty became greater as the study of literature has been busy with the theoretical discussion and exploration rather than methodological ones. There are rarely books that discuss the issue in the research methods of literature. "It is not surprising that Indonesia alone, precisely since the late 1970s to 1980s, when discussion of the theory was so warm there, literary scientists still could not distinguish theoretical problems from methodological problems," he said.
The trend can be seen, for example, in the dissertations produced in that period, for example first dissertations in literary science in UGM, there were Hikayat Hang Tuah: Analysis of Structure and Function (Sutrisno, 1983) and I. Kuntara Wiryamartana’s dissertation entitled Arjunawiwaha, which was maintained in 1982 and published in 1990. "Therefore, literary scholars, especially in Indonesia, need to give more serious attention by performing more extensive and intensive explanation on methodological issues, particularly related to the phenomenon of postmodern literary works born from multimedia sensibility," said the man born in Banjarmasin, February 10, 1957.