The second case study investigates the “bottom-up” modernization performed by the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information. The first explores the top-down modernization undertaken by President Soeharto’s assistants at the National Development Planning Board, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology.
Part Two uses three case studies to analyze the middling classes’ search for Indonesian modernity under the New Order. Part One reconstructs the evolution of the Indonesian middling classes and their search for progress. This dissertation tackles one central problem: What were the intellectual and social origins of New Order Indonesia (1966-1998)? The analytical lens that this study employs to examine this society is the Indonesian middling classes’ pursuit of modernity. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safe- guard the existence of a linguistic authority. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. This article ex- amines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. Mean- while, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. Sympathetic literary critics view young people’s attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observ- ers.
Teenlit,a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents.
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