Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s works are highly distinguished for their strong realist characteristic and profound analysis of interactions among pre- and post- colonial human beings and their place in society. One of the works that portray such characteristics is “Houseboy + Maid”, the first story in Toer’s collection Tales from Djakarta: Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings. In this research, post-colonialism and contrapuntal reading proposed by Edward Said are used as methods to interpret a literary work whose narration is about two characters who live in post-colonial Indonesia, or rather post-revolutionary Indonesia. Their unfixed identities which are interrelated through the changing event of the plot indicates that their very destiny cannot be separated from the “politicality, sociality, and historicality” of much bigger entities.

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<p class="AbstractText">The theme of a guardian angel has always become cryptic discussion among scholars, for as God, she is beyond our empirical grasp. Hari Kunzru is one of the writers who broach this subject in his work entitled “Deus Ex Machina”. In the short story, the guardian angel acts as the I-character of the story as well as the I-narrator of the story. By using theories on textual deconstruction and existentialism, we discuss and analyze the guardian angel’s <em>raison d’etre</em> (reason to be) and significance through her functions as the narrator and also the I-character in the narration of “Deus Ex Machina” story. From the analysis, we could draw three conclusions which relate <em>raison d’etre</em> (reason to be) and the significance of the guardian angel with the other characters within the story and with her readers outside the story.</p>

Karya Albert Camus, seorang penulis Aljazair yang kemudian pindah ke Perancis, secara signifikan memperlihatkan sifat eksistensialisme. Tulisan ini mencoba untuk menjelaskan unsur-unsur eksistensialisme dalam satu karya Camus. L’etranger, yang sudah diterjemahkan ke dalam bahasa Indonesia, dengan judul Orang Asing.

Modernism’s overemphasize on universal objectivity as well as its optimistic humanism have generated critical questions. The critics on modernism, labeled under the name of postmodernists, question the neutrality assumed by humanist universalism and scientific objectivism. Seeing the ugly sides of enlightenments, the modernist critics begins to see modernism “as deeply implicated by forms of oppression: sexism, racism, class-ism, colonialism”. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a modernist work from the view point of postmodernism. The work that is under discussion here is “Tonka” by Robert Musil. Within the story, we can see that a form of oppression appears. We are to find  how the form of oppression within the story works. It is interesting to find that the oppression works through the act of silencing. To see how silence is interwoven in the story, we have to firstly set some limitation to make possible the discussion on silence itself. The easiest way to do it is by putting the entity in a binary opposition since the text strongly shows binary organization.