In my previous essay “Undoing the Canon”, I argued for the urgency of context-sensitive modes of reading Indonesian literature that consider the prolific, ephemeral, and scattered nature of Indonesia’s literary system. I introduced my machine-readable corpus of Indonesian literary texts through which I aim to capture underlying patterns, systems, and structures that organize the Indonesian literary field. In this essay, I continue this line of argumentation by turning to the societal, structural, and material interconnections of Indonesia’s literary system, which, as I aim to show, must be considered when approaching Indonesian literature. Based on the short story case, I argue that Indonesian literature cannot be separated from its dynamic system of circulation, which shapes audiences, reading practices, and the nature of literature itself. I develop this argument in three parts. First, I address how the mode of publication of short stories shapes the genre and creates an elusive market that is difficult for readers to navigate, due to its orientation towards immediate publication, the material and temporal dispersion of sources, and the uncertainty in provenance. Second, I position alternative channels of circulation as the result of emergent and participatory reading practices that organize this elusive literary market. Finally, I conclude this essay by demonstrating how these alternative channels of circulation can be leveraged for systematic literary documentation and distant reading, contributing to a contextual approach to Indonesian literature.
Since the formation of the genre around the early 20th century, short stories have been regularly published in newspapers and magazines (Kratz 1982; Davidson 1982). This mode of publication has been profoundly shaping the character of the genre. With an average length of 1,000 to 2,500 words, Indonesian short stories are comparatively compact, in contrast to longer short story types, for example, those of Anton Chekhov (Danerek 2005). The reason they are so short, making them “quick to read” and “less time-consuming to write”, is to meet the expectations and demands of the numerous periodicals around the archipelago that publish short stories on a weekly to monthly basis (Davidson 1982, 7). Shaped by this “hegemony of newspapers in the genre” (Danerek 2005, 31), most Indonesian short stories are written with an orientation towards immediate publication rather than the intention to create timeless masterpieces. In other words, they “are not meant for eternity” but resemble utterances closely tied to the time and context of publication (Derks 1996, 350; Shackford-Bradley 2006, 94). This sense of immediacy in their production and publication points to the influence of an oral-oriented literature where texts are not written to be read in silence but to be performed and witnessed by an audience (Derks 1996; Sweeney 1980).
Figure 1: Bits of Literature
The periodical mode of publication, emphasizing immediacy over permanence, made the short story one of the most prolific but also elusive genres of modern Indonesian literature. Figure 1 illustrates this condition. It shows the regularity and quantity of a sample of 6,372 Indonesian short-story publications between 2010 and 2023 across more than 50 periodicals. Each dot represents an individual publication, and the colors identify which of the many periodicals published a piece. Every stack of dots indicates that more than one short story was published on a single day. Ultimately, this figure demonstrates the abundance, as well as the material and temporal scatteredness, of Indonesian short-story publications. The volume of published pieces is so vast, “much greater than we ordinary mortals can ever hope to comprehend” (Derks 1996, 344), that Indonesian literature has rightfully been described as “a literature of short stories” (Kratz 1988, 139). It is almost impossible for readers to keep track of what is published when, where, and by whom, due to the scattered and ephemeral character of the market. There is a myriad of works, produced by a large number of authors, published across a wide range of national and local periodicals, and dispersed across numerous issues. Thus, most short stories, for example, those written by a specific author, cannot be selectively acquired through a bookstore the same way as novels.
Figure 2: The Short Story Machine
This condition makes it difficult for readers to discover, access, and recognize specific works. They become indistinguishable as individual contributions within the vast mass of publications. Thus, rather than being separate entities, short stories must be considered nodes embedded in a network. Figure 2 illustrates this embeddedness of the market in the form of a social network, which shows the interactions among the large number of periodicals or publishers (green nodes) and authors or producers (red nodes). Connections (or edges) indicate whether an author has published a short story in a specific periodical. The nodes’ sizes indicate the number of publications by authors and periodicals between 2010 and 2023. Ultimately, the network demonstrates that the Indonesian short story market is not only characterized by an abundance of works but also a complex interplay between a multiplicity of actors that produce the market’s raw mass. Within this flux of interactions, it becomes difficult for readers to recognize, access, and discover works as discrete entities, impeding the formation of audiences.
However, if limited discoverability, access, and recognition impede the formation of audiences, then how do short stories find their readers and how do readers find their short stories? The key to their circulation lies in the reading practices which cannot be reduced to the mere act of going word-for-word through a text. Instead, reading involves implicit acts such as documenting, collecting, organizing, and republishing short stories, creating alternative channels of circulation that disseminate works and contribute to the formation of publics. As reading becomes a social, proactive, and participatory practice, readers become nodes in the networked literary system. A famous example of this participatory mode of reading is the effort of Indonesian literary critic H.B. Jassin (1917-2000), who collected and documented Indonesian newspaper literature throughout his career (see Figure 3). His endeavour began as a personal hobby, an emergent practice arising from the ephemeral, scattered literary system, and only much later became the formal literary archive as it is recognized today. Among other things, Jassin used this archive to republish works in anthologies and broaden their circulation across audiences and over time (Eneste 1987, 5–12). In general, printed anthologies became a medium for putting short stories in a more permanent form, making them more easily accessible in bookstores. One of the most prestigious anthologies is the annual short-story collection of the newspaper Kompas, but there are many other, lesser-known, more informal, grassroots anthologies that also emerge from this participatory mode of reading. Nevertheless, only a limited number of short stories make it into these anthologies, and even if most anthologies lack bibliographic information, such as the production date and the original publication’s date and venue, thereby maintaining a sense of elusiveness in terms of provenance (Kratz 1988).
Figure 3: A composite of a sample of 700 newspaper clippings containing short stories that were published between 1950-2010. The clippings were collected and documented as part of the H.B. Jassin literary archive. Reproductions available at Jakarta Library (https://kios-perpustakaan.jakarta.go.id/hb-jassin/catalogue)
In the mid-2000s, the rise of the participatory and user-generated internet (or Web 2.0) provided new opportunities for publicly sharing content, thereby expanding the conditions of possibility for the circulation of short stories. Newspapers that previously published in print also started posting short stories on their websites. Moreover, various platforms, websites, and online archives emerged that collect and republish short stories (see Danerek 2005; Rokib 2023; Rosa et al. 2024). These platforms not only post digitized versions of short stories previously published in print, but also publish and republish born-digital short stories that circulate only on the internet. Similar to printed anthologies, however, bibliographic information is often missing or incomplete, and the provenance of short stories remains ambiguous. In addition, these platforms are highly dynamic and in continual change, maintaining the ephemerality of the genre and indicating that circulation has become even faster than before. An example is a website titled Kliping Sastra (or Literature Clipping in English), which has been an important platform for the circulation of short stories on the internet. However, the structure, content, and domain of the website changed several times over its years of existence, making it difficult to reliably retrieve specific short stories. As of the time of writing this essay, the website has disappeared completely. Thus, this shift towards digital platforms further contributed to the elusiveness of the genre by blurring the boundaries between offline and online, print and digital, and creating additional uncertainty regarding provenance and sources.
Despite maintaining the status quo, the shift towards digital platforms in the circulation of short stories has also opened new possibilities for literary documentation. First, short stories online are potentially much more accessible than printed pieces, but they are also quickly changing and hard to find amid the cacophony of the internet. Second, as the internet imposes some degree of structural regularity, short stories are stored in standardized structures and formats, facilitating systematic and (semi-)automated documentation and collection. Again, limits apply, as there is a range of standards, and websites adhere to them to varying degrees, leading to a range of irregularities. Third, most short stories on the internet are machine-readable by default, which enables automated copying, parsing, and indexing without additional digitization effort. Altogether, these affordances enable the systematization of the contextual and participatory reading practices that organize the elusive short-story market. Through this systematic mode of reading, comprehensive insight into Indonesia’s complex and dynamic literary system is now possible. It facilitates context-sensitive approaches to Indonesian literature, such as distant reading, that take into account its networked system of circulation (see previous essay).
Ultimately, a systematic and contextual approach to Indonesian short stories is not new. It has been tacitly practiced by committed readers and scholars of Indonesian literature, such as H.B. Jassin and Ulrich Kratz. My contribution is to make these practices visible as constitutive elements of the genre: the short story’s meanings, publics, and afterlives are shaped not only in writing but in the infrastructural practices of locating texts, documenting provenance, and enabling access amid dispersion and loss. In this sense, reading Indonesian literature is not merely textual interpretation; it is also a form of documentation that traces circulation pathways and records the conditions under which texts become discoverable, citable, and readable at all. Moreover, based on the affordances entailed by the shift to digital platforms in the circulation of short stories, I demonstrated the potential to formalize these participatory reading practices as systematic literary documentation and distant reading. I situate this endeavor as part of a broader project to conceptualize context-sensitive approaches to Indonesian literature by considering the societal, structural, and material interconnections of its networked literary system. The larger aim is to critically reflect on the foundations of how we define, approach, and ultimately read literature, thereby challenging decontextualized perspectives that risk imposing normative and generalized frameworks on Indonesian literature.
References
Stefan Danerek, Tjerita and Novel Literary Discourse in Post New Order Indonesia (Department of East Asian Languages, Lund University, 2005).
Jeremy H. C. S Davidson, “The Modern Short Story in South East Asia: An Introduction,” in The Short Story in South East Asia: Aspects of a Genre, edited by Jeremy H.C.S. Davidson and Helen Cordell (School of Oriential and African Studies, 1982).
Will Derks, ““If Not to Anything Else”: Some Reflections on Modern Indonesian Literature,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 152, no. 3 (1996): 341–52, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27864773.
Pamusuk Eneste, H.B. Jassin: Paus Sastra Indonesia (Djambatan, 1987).
Ernst Ulrich Kratz, “The Indonesian Short Story After 1945,” in The Short Story in South East Asia: Aspects of a Genre, edited by Jeremy H. C. S. Davidson and Helen Cordell (School of Oriential and African Studies, 1982).
Ernst Ulrich Kratz, A Bibliography of Indonesian Literature in Journals: Drama, Prose, Poetry (Gadjah Mada University Press, 1988).
M. Rokib, “Archiving Indonesian Online Literature Magazine as a Data Resource,” in Reimagining Innovation in Education and Social Sciences, 1st edn, by Irena Maureen, Muhamad Nurul Ashar, Wulan Patria Saroinsong, Lina Purwaning Hartanti, Mita Anggaryani, and Audrey Gabriella Titaley (Routledge, 2023) https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003366683-18.
Silvia Rosa, Noni Sukmawati, Nanda Saputra, and Endang Fatmawati, “Uncovering the Literary Landscape: Exploring the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Indonesian Literature,” Cogent Arts & Humanities 12, no. 1 (2025): 2507509, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2507509.
Julie Shackford-Bradley, “Cerpen: How Indonesian Short Stories Re-Present Urban Space and Public Discourse” Crossroads: An Interdiscliplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17, no. 2 (2006): 93–127.
Amin Sweeney, Authors and Audiences in Traditional Malay Literature. Monograph Series (Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 1980).
