PRELIMINARY EXAM REVIEWERS | S11LPW
LPW 21ST Century Literature from the
Philippines and the World
INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE
LITERARY STANDARDS
▪ Artistry | appeals to our sense of beauty
▪ Intellectual Value | must stimulate thought; must
enrich our mental life by making us realize
fundamental truths
▪ Suggestiveness | emotional power of literature to
make us feel deeply and stir our imagination
▪ Spiritual Value | brings our moral values into the
realm of the physical world
▪ Permanence | endures and can be read again as
each reading gives fresh delights; long-lasting
▪ Universality | forever relevant
▪ Style | writer’s view in life; forms his/her ideas
and expresses them
DIVISIONS OF LITERATURE
▪ Prose | spoken/written within the common flow
of language in sentences and paragraphs
o Fiction | imaginative narration fashioned to
entertain and to make readers think and feel
1. Legend | origin of things around us
2. Short Story | simple characterization
ang plot conveying a moral which can be
read in one sitting
3. Novel | complex characterization and
plot that is usually divided into chapters
4. Novella | shorter than a novel but longer
than a short story
5. Fable | depicting animal characters
6. Parable | presents a philosophical
outlook in life
o Non-Fiction | real-life exposition or narration
based on history and facts
1. Biography | life of a person written by
another person
2. History | record of events that
transpired in the past
3. News | narrative of events that happen
everyday
4. Essay | formal treatment of an issue
written from the writer’s point of view
o Creative Non-Fiction | non-fiction written
with creative/figurative language
1. Diary | personal account of significant
events
2. Anecdote | incident in a person’s life
▪ Poetry | expressed in verse, measure, rhythm,
sound, and imaginative language
o Narrative | narrates a story
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Prepared by Kenneth Opoc
1. Epic | heroic exploits of a community’s
hero, usually involving supernatural
abilities
2. Ballad | single incident that transpired
in a person’s life; may be sung
3. Metrical Tale | narrates a story in a
metered number of syllables
• Awit | romance metrical tale of
dodecasyllabic measure
• Corrido | adventure metrical tale of
octosyllabic measure
o Lyric | intended to be sung with the
accompaniment of music / musical
instruments
1. Song | meant to be sung in its entirety
2. Ode | noble and exalted emotion which
has dignified countenance
3. Elegy | sad theme
4. Sonnet | 14 iambic pentameter lines
usually about love
5. Idyll | tranquility of rural settings
▪ Drama | meant to be performed on stage
o Tragedy | features a hero whose shortcoming
eventually causes his downfall
o Comedy | hero triumphs and overcomes the
odds; emerges victoriously
o Melodrama | combination of elements of
tragedy and comedy, ends happily
o Farce | exaggerated comedy that aims to
elicit laughter, hence, relaxation
o Social Play | tackles social issues
FIGURES OF SPEECH | expressions that use words or
phrases to achieve effects beyond the ordinary
language
▪ Simile | comparison between two dissimilar
elements with the use of ‘like’ or ‘as’
“Your love is like the sun.”
▪ Metaphor | words or phrases denoting one kind of
idea or object in place of another for suggesting
a comparison or addition to meaning
“You are my sunshine.”
▪ Personification | giving human qualities to
inanimate objects
“The leaves dance with the wind.”
▪ Metonymy | word or phrase to substitute to
another for which it bears a significant relation
as the effect for the cause
PRELIMINARY EXAM REVIEWERS | S11LPW
“He is an avid reader of Shakespeare.”
▪ Synecdoche | use of a part to stand for a whole,
or vice versa
“The government signed the law regarding
regularization of workers.”
▪ Hyperbole | exaggeration of fact or possibility
“He is crying a river.”
▪ Litotes | understatement that asserts an
affirmative by negating its contrary
“He’s not the smartest person in class.”
▪ Irony | dissembling/hiding what is actually the
case
o Verbal Irony | a speaker utters one thing and
means the opposite
o Irony of Situation | a situation turns out to
be the opposite of what is expected
o Dramatic Irony | when a reader/audience
knows something that a character in the
story doesn’t know
▪ Paradox | statement that appears to be logically
contradictory, yet makes good emotional sense
“It is only in dying that we start living.”
▪ Oxymoron | phrase that combines two
seemingly incompatible words/elements
“I heard the crashing silence.”
▪ Allusion | use of reference without explicit
identification to a literary/historical person, place,
or event, or to another literary work or passage
“Suffer not yourself to be betrayed by a kiss.”
▪ Apostrophe | direct address to a person who is
either absent or dead, an inanimate object or an
abstract idea
“Hail divinest Melancholy, whose saintly visage is
too bright to hit the sense of human sight.”
“WHY LITERATURE?”
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA | born in Peru, 1936; one of
the pioneers of the Boom Period in the Latin
American Literature; Nobel Prize Awardee in
Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures
and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance,
revolt, and defeat.”
▪ A survey conducted reveals that women read
more than men because of work
▪ Literature enables us to see that all men and
women are essentially equal
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Prepared by Kenneth Opoc
▪ Good literature breeds non-conformity
▪ “A society without literature, or a society which
literature has been relegated – like some hidden
vice – to the margins of social and personal life,
and transformed into something like a sectarian
cult, is a society condemned to become
spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its
freedom.”
▪ Specialization leads to a lack of social
understanding, to the division of human beings
into ghettos of technicians and specialists
▪ “Love and pleasure would be poorer, hey would
lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to
attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers.”
▪ Audio-visual media cannot be a substitute to
literature
▪ Sooner or later, the society will become a
‘paperless’ world (Bill Gates), which Llosa writes
contrary to
▪ “Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood,
the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the
worst is the discovery that this violence and this
excess are not foreign to us, that they are a
profound part of humanity.”
NAME-BASED VOCABULARY WORDS
▪ Orwellian | derived from George Orwell, relative
or suggestive of the dystopian reality depicted
▪ Borgesian | derived from Jorge Luis Borges,
referring to fantasy or magic realism
▪ Rabelaisian | derived from Francois Rabelais,
marks gross robust humor, extravagance of
caricature, or bold naturalism
▪ Kafkaesque | derived from Franz Kafka, marks
the feeling of being powerless to
understand/take control of what’s happening
▪ Quixotic | derived from Don Quixote written by
Miguel de Cervantes, marks being exceedingly
idealistic
LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
21st Century Society is characterized by:
▪ High-tech knowledge age (death of print)
▪ Rapid population explosion and hunger
▪ Terrorism and extremism
▪ Climate change
▪ Mercurial politics, polarization and wars
▪ LGBT societies
▪ Commercialism
▪ Extreme individuality
21ST CENTURY THEMES IN LITERATURE
▪ Identity
o Search for identity
o Life’s meaning/meaninglessness
PRELIMINARY EXAM REVIEWERS | S11LPW
o Redefining one’s identity
▪ History and memory (including post-colonial
viewpoints)
▪ Social evils
o War
o Terrorism
o Racism
o Religious Conflicts
▪ Catastrophe
o Natural
o Man-made
▪ Merits and/or perils of technology
▪ Personalization of narratives
▪ Fracturing (retelling from another angle)
▪ Effects of commercialism
NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Nobel Prize | largest share of Alfred Nobel’s fortune;
awarded to the most outstanding personalities for
their work
▪ John Coetzee (2003) | based in South Africa;
writer in the field of fiction; won the Nobel Prize
for being a novelist “who in innumerable guises
portrays the surprising involvement of the
outsider”
▪ Harold Pinter (2005) | English; writer of drama
(also a screenwriter and actor); won the Nobel
Prize for being a playwright “who in his plays
uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle
and forces entry into oppression’s closed doors”
▪ Orhan Pamuk (2006) | based in Turkey; writer in
the field of fiction; won the Nobel Prize for being
a novelist “who in his quest for the melancholic
soul of his native city has discovered new
symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”
▪ Doris Lessing (2007) | British; writer of fiction,
non-fiction, and drama; won the Nobel Prize for
being a novelist described as “that epicist of the
female experience, who with skepticism, fire, and
visionary power has subjected a divided
civilization to scrutiny”
▪ Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) | based in Peru; writer
in the field of prose; won the Nobel Prize “for his
cartography of structures and his trenchant
images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and
defeat.”
▪ Mo Yan (2012) | based in China; writer in the field
of fiction; won the Nobel Prize for being a
fictionist “who with hallucinatory realism
emerges folk tales, history, and the
contemporary”
▪ Alice Munro (2013) | based in Canada; writer in
the field of fiction; won the Nobel Prize for being
the “master of the contemporary short story”
▪ Patrick Modiano (2014) | based in France; writer
in the field of fiction; won the Nobel Prize “for the
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art of memory with which he has evoked the
most ungraspable human destinies and
uncovered the life-world of the occupation”
▪ Bob Dylan (2016) | based in USA; writer in the
field of music (singer-composer); won the Nobel
Prize for “having created new poetic expressions
within the great American song tradition”
▪ Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) | English (born in Japan,
grew in England); writer in the field of fiction; won
the Nobel Prize for being a fictionist “who, in
novels of great emotional force, has uncovered
the abyss beneath our illusory sense of
connection with the world”
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PHILIPPINE
LITERATURE
PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD (Past-1521) | spontaneous
and instinctive; expressed in its own dialect; crude in
ideology and phraseology
▪ Myth | deal with the creation of the universe, the
origin of man, the gods, and supernatural beings,
and native culture heroes
▪ Legend | prose narratives regarded true by the
narrator and audience but are set in a period
more remote, when the world was as much as it
is today
▪ Fable | stories that use animals as characters;
meant to impart lessons
▪ Proverb | statements that show didactics in the
contents an its conciseness for the form
▪ Tanaga | short folk poems composed of four lines
with strictly seven syllables each; full of
metaphors
▪ Riddle | traditional verbal expression containing
one or two descriptive elements, a pair of which
may be in opposition to each other, which the
referent of the elements is to be guessed
▪ Folk Epic | narrative of sustained length, based on
oral tradition, revolving around supernatural
events and heroic deeds; verse form, either
chanted or sung, with a certain seriousness of
purpose, embodying or validating the beliefs,
customs, or ideals of the people
LITERATURE DURING THE SPANISH COLONIZATION
(1521-1898) | centered on Christian faith, imitative of
Spanish themes, forms, and traditions; repetitious
plots; the rise of the printing press in the 19th century
enabled faster dissemination of works
▪ Pasyon | tells the passion and death of Christ;
replaced the epic poems of the pagan past
▪ Komedya | native poetic theater whose plots are
drawn from medieval Spanish ballads; later
known as moro-moro (poetic theater about
Christian and Moorish warriors)
PRELIMINARY EXAM REVIEWERS | S11LPW
▪ Awit and Korido | Philippine metrical romances
(see metrical tale, page 1)
▪ Prose | the propaganda movement and the
Revolution of were able to produce some
important literary texts, among of which are Jose
Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo
LITERATURE UNDER THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION
(1898–1941) | the Spanish continued to dominate the
elite; English became the official language of
communication; Thomasites became the Filipinos’
first teachers
▪ Poetry | used as a vehicle for language-learning
rather than an art; used for personal purposes;
used as a means of promoting national
sentiments
▪ Fiction | unified single expression or effect
through atmosphere, tone, and style; has a
plausible characterization; has a well-defined
plot structure
LITERATURE DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION
(1941-1945) | the Japanese pushed for the use of
Tagalog and de-emphasized English; writers who used
to write in English turned to Filipino because of strict
prohibitions of the Japanese; most of newspaper
publishing were stopped; Filipino literature was
given a break
▪ Drama | experienced a lull because movie houses
showing American films were closed; big movie
houses were made to show stage shows, many
of which are just English plays reproduced to
Tagalog
▪ Short Story | widened during the Japanese
occupation; prominent writers include Brigido
Batungbakal, Macario Pineda, Liwayway Arceo,
and many others
LITERATURE DURING THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD
(1945-1986) | entry of new criticism; resurgence of
nationalist movement with students as core during
the Martial Law years; Philippine Literature
flourished, as it continued to grow in various
languages (including the vernacular) especially with
the appearance of new publications after the Martial
Law years
▪ Prominent writers include Emmanuel Torres,
Gemino Abad, Marjorie Evasco, Cirilo Bautista,
and many others
LITERATURE AFTER THE EDSA PEOPLE POWER
REVOLUTION (1986-Present) | Filipino writers
continue to write poetry and short fiction with the
varied themes (social commitment, gender/ethnic
related, personal or impersonal, etc.); the emergence
of creative non-fiction has widened the span of prose
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thereby is a positive sign to encourage more writers to
publish
21ST CENTURY NATIONAL ARTISTS FOR LITERATURE
National Artist Award | highest recognition given to
a Filipino who has given significant contributions;
administered by the Cultural Center of the
Philippines and the National Commission for Culture
and the Arts, conferred by the President of the
Philippines upon recommendation.
▪ Francisco Sionil Jose (2001) | evokes consistent
espousal of the aspirations of the Filipino – for
national sovereignty and social justice; his sheer
writing makes him the forefront of Filipino
writing in English
▪ Alejandro Roces (2003) | short story writer and
essayist, considered as the country’s best writer
of comic short stories; known for his widely
anthologized “My Brother’s Peculiar Chicken”;
brought about the aesthetics of the country’s
fiestas
▪ Virgilio Almario (2003) | a poet, literary historian
and critic, who has revived and reinvented
traditional Filipino poetic forms, even as he
championed modernist poetics
▪ Bienvenido Lumbera (2006) | pioneered the
creative fusion of fine arts and popular
imagination; historicized Philippine literature and
reinvented the society’s colonial point of view;
emphasized interplaying issues of nation and
class
▪ Lazaro Francisco (2009) | developed the social
realist tradition in Philippine fiction; emphasizes
his commitment to nationalism through his
novels; “Master of the Tagalog Novel”
▪ Cirilo Bautista (2014) | greatly contributed to the
development of the country’s literary arts;
strengthened the Filipinos’ sense of nationalism
▪ Ramon Muzones (2018) | credited for
popularizing Hiligaynon literature through his
works; wrote a total of 62 novels during his
lifetime; his Margosatubig (1946) was the first
Hiligaynon bestseller
▪ Resil Mojares (2018) | respected literary
historian; has six Philippine National Book
Awards; author of Waiting for Maria Makiling:
Essays in Philippine Cultural History