ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC.

21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD

Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3

Representative Texts and Authors from Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa

Literature is meant to be universal. It has been proven countless times that literature has the capacity to reach and touch people
from all walks of life. This is even truer now because literature is easily translated into other languages, some of which you may even
download for free from the Internet. This rapid transit and transmission of literary data have been predicted before in letters that one
particular German literary critic has written to so many of his colleagues. His name was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who coined the
term weltliteratur, which literally means "world literature."

In the essay "World Literature and European Literature" by Roberto Dainotto, it is recounted how Goethe, when he was reading
a Chinese novel, had realized that the Oriental society portrayed in the novel was quite the same as his German one—actually, the
characters "think, feel, and act" the same way that he did, and only found the Chinese more efficient at they do. He had said then that
the concept of weltliteratur is meant to be a two-way process: that literature may be shared by one nation to the other so that it is a give-
and-take process. He predicted that world literature will bring about a "rapid traffic" of information. This is his concept of world literature
and how it all started. Imagine Goethe's reaction to the way you use the Internet now!

The idea of a "world literature" is the way this second unit was intended to be written for you. The modules are arranged such
that you are introduced to the literature outside of the country by first immersing yourself in our neighbors in Southeast Asia, until you
reach the other side of the globe. In this way, you are given time to acclimate yourself to the cultures, society, and situations that are
most familiar to you first, until you are ready to explore other parts of the literary world. Furthermore, Unit Il is meant to let you realize
your place in the vastness of the world by comprehending and understanding the nature of other cultures and the way they relate to
yours. Most importantly, you may realize how these cultures may enrich your own Filipino culture and vice versa. The possibilities are
endless in world literature, and this is what you will discover as you go through the exciting and enriching literary selections in this unit.

Representative Texts and Authors: Asia

1. Haruki Murakami (Japan)

• He was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949. He grew up in Kobe and then moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University.
After college, Murakami opened a small jazz bar, which he and his wife ran for seven years.
• His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers in 1979. He followed this success with
two sequels, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, which all together form “The Trilogy of the Rat.”
• Murakami’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages

2. Tabish Khair (India)

• Born and educated in the town of Gaya, in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of various books, including the poetry
collections, studies, and novels. He has also edited or co-edited other scholarly works.
• His novels have been shortlisted for 16 prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize
and the Encore Award, and translated into several languages.
• Some of his works include Where Parallel Lines Meet, The Gothic and The Bus Stopped.
• Khair now mostly lives in a village off the town of Aarhus, Denmark.

3. Bi Feiyu (China)
• He was born 1964 in Xinghua, Jiangsu, is a Chinese writer. He is a resident of Nanjing. His name, Feiyu, means "one who flies
across the universe".
• His works are known for their complex portrayal of the "female psyche." Feiyu's novel The Moon Opera, translated by Howard
Goldblatt, was longlisted for the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, while Three Sisters, also translated by Goldblatt, won
the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. In China, his awards include twice winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize; and the 2011 Mao Dun
Prize, the highest national literary award, for Massage. He also wrote the screenplay for Zhang Yimou's 1996 film Shanghai
Triad.
• His most famous literary work is Three Siters

4. Kim Young Ha (South Korea)

• He was born in Hwacheon. He moved from place to place as a child, since his father was in the military. As a child, he suffered
from gas poisoning from coal gas and lost memory before ten.
• He was educated at Yonsei University in Seoul, majoring business administration, but he didn't show much interest in it. Instead
he focused on writing stories. Kim, after graduating from Yonsei University in 1993, began his military service as an assistant

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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
detective at the military police 51st Infantry Division near Suwon. His career as a professional writer started in 1995 right after
discharge.
• Kim previously worked as a professor in the Drama School at Korean National University of Arts and on a regular basis hosted
a book-themed radio program. In autumn 2008, he resigned all his jobs to devote himself exclusively to writing. He currently
lives in Seoul, Korea.
• Your Republic is Calling You, I have right to destroy myself and Black flower are some of his famous works.

5. Catherine Lim (Singapore)

• She is the doyenne of Singapore stories. Lim is an accomplished and critically acclaimed author who has published a dozen
collections of short stories, five novels, two volumes of poems and even a play.
• She began as a teacher, then was a project director with the Ministry of Education, became a specialist lecturer with the Regional
Language Centre (RELC), and finally became a full-time writer in 1992. She has won national and regional book prizes for her
literary contributions. Her works are studied in local and foreign schools and universities, and have been published in various
languages in several countries.
• Some of her works include The Teardrop Story Woman and Love’s Lonely Impulses

About the Author

• Latiff Mohidin is a poet and a painter who was born in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. He has been known as a
"Boy Wonder" since he was Il because of the artistry of his works. He has attended schools under various scholarships in
Berlin, Germany; Paris, France; and New York, USA. He is considered to be one of Malaysia's most treasured living artists.

Latiff Mohidin

At dawn they returned home

their soaking clothes torn
and approached the stove
their limbs marked by scratches
their legs full of wounds
but on their brows
there was not a sign of despair
The whole day and night just passed
they had to brave the horrendous flood
in the water all the time
between bloated carcasses
and tiny chips of tree barks
desperately looking for their son's
albino buffalo that was never found

They were born amidst hardship

and grew up without a sigh or a complaint
now they are in the kitchen, making
jokes while rolling their cigarette leaves

Representative Texts and Authors: North America

1. Edgar Allan Poe

• His stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and
critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction.
• His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is
unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven” numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature.

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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
2. Mark Twain
• He was a humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The
Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi, and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become
a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

3. William Faulkner
• He was a Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels and short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and
screenplays.
• He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County,
Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.

4. T.S. Eliot
• He was a playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land
(1922) and Four Quartets (1943).
• Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in
diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and
erected new ones

5. Harriet Beacher Stowe

• She was a writer and philanthropist, the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so much to popular feeling
against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War.
• Harriet Beecher was a member of one of the 19th century’s most remarkable families.

About the Author

• Robert Lee Frost was an Alllerican poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America.
He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work
frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex
social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century,
Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare
"public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetical
works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet laureate of Vermont.

Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Representative Texts and Authors: Europe

1. Homer (Greece)
• He was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics Iliad and
Odyssey, Phocais and Capture of Oechalia.
• He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and
culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire
and the spread of Christianity.
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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
2. Giovanni Boccaccio (Italy)
• He passed his early childhood rather unhappily in Florence.
• He was the greatest of Petrarch’s disciples, an important Renaissance humanist in his own right.
• His works include Decameron and On Famous Women.

3. Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra (Spain)

• He was a novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish
literature.
• His influence on Spanish Language has been so great that Spanish is often called “la lengua de Cervantes.”

4. William Shakespeare (United Kingdom)

• William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor.
• Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of British theatre (sometimes called the English
Renaissance or the Early Modern Period). Shakespeare’s plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are not all he
wrote. Shakespeare’s poems also remain popular to this day.

5. Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

• He is notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance and his contributions to Russian literature and politics.
• He wrote the acclaimed novels 'War and Peace,' 'Anna Karenina' and 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich,' and ranks among the world's
top writers.

About the Author

• Elizabeth Barret Browning was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular
in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. She was born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth
Barrett was educated at home. She wrote poetry from about the age of six and this was collected by her mother into one of
the largest collections extant of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 she became ill, suffering from intense head and spinal
pain for the rest of her life, rendering her frail. She took laudanum for the pain, which may have led to a lifelong addiction
and contributed to her weak health.

Elizabeth Barret Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Representative Texts and Authors: Latin America

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)

• He was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
• His most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, came out in 1967 and left the whole world in awe. The novel details
the life of the Buendia family over seven generations and is claimed to be “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language”
since Don Quixote and “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire
human race”, according to The Guardian.

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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
2. Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
• Mainly a short-story writer, Borges was a key figure in the Spanish-language literature. Educated in Switzerland, fluent in 5
languages, exceptionally well-traveled and impressively intelligent, Borges became a published writer in 1920s when he finally
returned to Argentina. A poet, an essayist, a librarian and a public speaker, he was fast becoming famous — but also gradually
becoming blind, Already by his 50ies, Borges completely lost his eyesight. Which was, as many critics suggest, exactly what
helped the writer to come up with innovative literary symbols since the only thing that was left for him was his imagination.
• Considered one of the most famous Latin American authors of all time, Borges’ most notable works include Fictions, The Aleph,
and Labyrinths, among others.

3. Pablo Neruda (Chile)

• A poet, a diplomat and a politician, Neruda’s real name was actually Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, whereas his pen name
was borrowed from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, whom, funnily enough, nobody is really aware of. Pablo Neruda became a
known poet when he was still a teenager.
• The work that earned him world recognition was Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published in 1924 when he was
just 20 years old. Gabriel Garcia Marques called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century — in any language”.

4. Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)

• Vargas Llosa is considered as one of the leading writers of his generation and most significant novelists in South America. He
rose to fame in 1960 with his comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels and political thrillers – his talent knows no limitations
in literary genre. Like many of his fellow Latin American authors, Mario Vargas Llosa has always been interested in politics, and
even ran for president of Peru in 1990.

5. Octavio Paz (Mexico)

• Octavio Paz’ first introduction to the world of fiction happened in his early childhood: his grandfather was the owner of a huge
library filled with classic Mexican and European literature. Just like Neruda, Paz became a published writer during his teenage
years, so by his early twenties he was already a recognized poet. And again, just like Neruda, his spark and talent were used
by the government for diplomatic purposes, which was the reason Paz spent a lot of time abroad away from Mexico.
Nevertheless, his homeland was always the underlying motive of his works, which are now known as “the portrait of Mexican
personality” (according to his obituary in Americas).

About the Author

• Sara de Ibañez is a poet from Uruguay. She has won many literary awards during her career and had written some of
the most famous collections of poetry in Latin America.

Sara de Ibañez
In the north the cold and its broken jasmine.
In the east a nightingale full of thorns.
In the south the rose in its airy mines,
and in the west a road deep in thought.

In the north an angel lies gagged.

In the east the song commands its mists.
In the south my tender bunch of thin palm trees,
and in the west my door and my worry.

A flight of cloud or sigh could

trace this finest of all borders
that amply defends my refuge.
A distant retribution of wave bursts
and bites into your foreign oblivion,
my dry island in midst the battle.

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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
Representative Texts and Authors: Africa

1. Ngungi wa Thiong’o (Kenya)

• He was considered East Africa’s leading novelist. His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by
an East African. As he became sensitized to the effects of colonialism in Africa.
• The prizewinning Weep Not, Child is the story of a Kikuyu family drawn into the struggle for Kenyan independence during the
state of emergency and the Mau Mau rebellion.
• Ngugi adopted his traditional name and wrote in the Bantu language of Kenya’s Kikuyu people.

2. Abdelkader Alloula (Somalia)

• He was born in Ghazaouet in western Algeria and studied drama in France. He joined the Algerian National Theatre upon its
creation in 1963 following independence. His works, typically in vernacular Algerian Arabic including El-Aaleg (The Leech), El-
Khobza (Bread) and El-Agoula (The Sayings).
• He was an Algerian playwright who was assassinated by Islamists.

3. Khaled Mattawa (Libya)

• He was born and raised in Benghazi, Libya, but was relocated to the United States as a teenager in 1979.
• Influenced by Milan Kundera and Federico García Lorca, as well as the Arab poets whose work he translates, Mattawa’s
poetry frequently explores the intersection of culture, narrative, and memory.
• Mattawa has published several collections of poetry, including Tocqueville (2010) and translated numerous volumes of
contemporary Arabic poetry, including Adonis's Concerto al-Quds (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (2017). His own
work has been widely anthologized as well.

4. Mohamed Zafzaf (Morocco)

• Zafzaf was born in Souk Larbaa El Gharb, and lived in Casablanca, where he wrote his stories and articles and translated
books from Spanish and French. He studied philosophy at the faculté des lettres et sciences humaines in Rabat and worked
first as a junior high school teacher and librarian. His first poem was published in 1962, and his first short story in 1963.
• His novels include The woman and the rose, The roosters egg and The fox who appeared and vanished.

5. Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana)

• She is a Ghanaian writer whose work, written in English, emphasized the paradoxical position of the modern African woman.
• She won early recognition with a problem play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), in which a Ghanaian student returning home
brings his African American wife into the traditional culture and the extended family that he now finds restrictive.
• Aidoo herself won a fellowship to Stanford University in California, returned to teach at Cape Coast, Ghana (1970–82), and
subsequently accepted various visiting professorships in the United States and Kenya.

About the Author

• Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka, better known Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He is the
first African to be honored the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. He studied in both Nigeria and the UK, where he eventually
worked with the Royal Court Theatre of London. His plays were produced both in Nigeria and London. He has also been a
staunch political activist, which led to his arrest during the Nigerian Civil War and solitary confinement for two years.

Wole Soyinka

My apparition rose from the fall of lead,

Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.

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 ST. JOSEPH’S INSTITUTE, INC. 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
Candon City, Ilocos Sur GRADE 11
School Year 2021 – 2022 HANDOUT # 3
You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your training sessions, cautioning—
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth

From the lead festival of your more eager friends

Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.

I hope some day

Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signaling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair

With meat and bread, a ground of wine

A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question – do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?

REFERENCES

Cabuguang, R. (2019). Representative Text and Authors in the World.

https://www.scribd.com/document/426392992/Representative-Text-and-Authors-in-the-World

Private Education Assistance Committee. (2019). Ensuring SHS Learner’s Preparation for the Four Exits of the k to 12
Curriculum. PEAC

Uychoco, M.T. (2016). 21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World. Manila: Rex Bookstore, Inc.