Literature and Politics of Creative Industries to Welcome AEC

Abstract

High school curriculum puts English literature as one of the important subjects in welcoming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Unfortunately the classes fail to discuss English Literature because of the teachers’ lack of knowledge on literature. They study grammar like the usual Bahasa Inggris class instead of literature. This poor condition has been reported by school teachers in a favorite high school in town, Jember-Jawa Timur. I write this paper to discuss literature and its changes in real world. Since the imaginative world presented in literary works, literature is taken as unimportant subject by the common people in Indonesia. Moreover, literature has insufficient portion in the school curriculum, even in Bahasa Indonesia, studying literature is stopped, it vanishes from the school books. Therefore, this paper focuses on the advantages of recognizing the relation of literature and real world, literature and its space as science, and literature and its chance in creative industries as a motor and a link of the cultural diversities in welcoming AEC. Thereby, literature is seen as a politics in this paper.