WORLD LIT PRE FINAL REVIEWER

The Lucky Plaza by Dinah Roma

 A poem that remembers an important landmark in Singapore for most OFWs who ended
up working in the progressive Southeast Asian city-state
 The Lucky Plaza is a mall along Singapore’s Orchard road, which throughout the years,
became a weekend gathering place for Filipinos to recover their sense of community,
especially that they are all far from home.
 This is a popular gathering place among Filipinos where they meet with other Filipino
workers in Singapore and hang out during Sundays
 Uses metonymy ( is a figure of speech in which one thing is replaced with a word closely
associated with it. An example of a metonymy is referring to the King as "the Crown.")
 Roma looks at the place as metonymic to one’s fate, a “lucky” one. The speaker, from a
first person point of view, describes an intimate friend whom she meets at a place called
The Lucky Plaza. When the speaker was at the Lucky Plaza, she comes to terms with
the reality by accepting that her life has the “same fractures of a people beyond
breaking. The same faith past years/ of despair.” The speaker in the end, find
redemption in misery as she realizes that she is “Wiser by the hour as the tensile lines/
singing of beauty cage her pain/within places of the imaginary.”

Dinah Roma

 Is a poet, scholar, and an associate professor at De La Salle University, Manila.

 As a poet, Roma was nurtured by the Siliman Writers Wokshop in Dumaguete under the
tutelage of late Edith and Edilberto Tiempo
 Roma was the product of the pioneering work of the Tiempos in developing a tradition of
New Criticism in Philippine Literature
 Under the influence of great writers of De La Salle University, like National Artist Cirillo
Bautista, her writing evolved, growing beyond concerns of form, braving new territories
of cultures, politics and society.

Symbol: Denotes something larger than just the thing it names. It is usually developed
through culture, but used as a literary term, it concretes the abstract.

Irony: Is the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however in
order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects

Parable: Is an allegorical or representative tale where characters are meant to represent

something else, such as a group of people or a principle.

Worldview : Is a way of comprehending reality. It encompasses principles, values, and

philosophies that shape the way we interpret the things around us.

Western Canon: Is a list of literary texts deemed by scholars and writers as “classical”
because of their theme, contribution to the literary world, or both.
Plot: is the manner in which the story is arranged

Conflict: is central to the plotting

Turning point: indicates the resolution of the conflict

An Earnest Parable by Merlinda Bobis

 A short story that tells the story of a number of people who presented food (or in this
case "specialty") from their corresponding country. They shared it with the different
characters in the story, indicating that they are "giving a little taste of their culture".
 The story makes use of the tongue as a literal and symbolic device
 Taste was used as a marker for difference in the earlier parts of the story, in that the
residents in the story all had their native dishes. Eventually, however flavors from these
unique dishes blend into each other. The marker for difference and similarity turned into
something new precisely because of their communal experience of sharing.

Merlinda Bobis

 A Filipina writer now based in Australia. She was born in Legazpi City, Albay. She
earned her bachelor of arts degree in Aquinas University and her postgraduate degrees
in University of Santo Tomas and University of Wollongong
 She writes bilingually and across literary genres
 Most of her works deal with immigrant experience, most notably from a woman’s
perspective. Food and taste are her devices of choice in many of these stories.