Creative Battle Space: The Sea in Indonesian Newspaper Short Stories

Abstract

The sea has always been a source of inspiration in literature. The sea becomes a creative battleground in literature because it depicts human life full of challenges, difficulties, hopes, and adventures. In literature, the sea becomes a metaphor that helps reveal human life's complexity by showing life's beauty and ferocity. This study aims to advance existing studies to identify unique concepts, ideologies, or discourses relating to the ocean that are hidden in 25 short stories from 2010 to 2021 in Indonesian newspapers. Using an interactive interpretation method, all short stories are analyzed through content analysis techniques to reveal the various creative battle spaces. Through a mixed methods study with a critical approach, this research found four creative battle spaces with their respective subspaces, namely: (1) economic battle space with capitalist and impact of capitalism subspace; (2) moral battle space with action crime and power struggle subspace; (3) inner battle space with serenity, sorrow relief, the battle between reality and desire, and the battle of life subspace; and (4) surrealism idea battle space with the meeting space of two worlds, the endless search, surrealism-economics, and spirituality and imagery subspace.