21st Century Literature

from the Philippines

and the World
AWARENESS:
Directions: Identify and write the name of the city whose landmark
is shown below. Choices are given in the box below.

What do you think is the best place in the world? Why?

 CONTEXTUAL READING
APPROACHES
1. Literary Reading through a
Biographical Context
understand the author’s background Understanding the author’s life can
connect the characters and their help you understand his or her work
morals to the author’s life thoroughly.

analyze the patterns of behavior Reading the author’s biography or

shown between and among the autobiography helps you see how
characters, the author, and the reader much his experiences shape his or
himself her work directly and indirectly.
Guide questions in reading literature
through a Biographical Context:

In what year was the text written and published?

Is there anything significant that happened in the author’s
life during this time?
What were the circumstances that happened to the author
before the writing of the text?
Are there characters and situations in the text that could be
representative of or are similar to the ones in the author’s life?
How will knowing about the author amplify your
appreciation of the work?
“Under My Invisible Umbrella” by
Laurel Fantauzzo

 talks about a Filipino-Italian who was born in the United States. Because
her features are more Italian than Filipina, she had encountered problems
with people treating her as “extra special” in the Philippines, but she finds
it more isolating than welcoming

 Fantauzzo’s way of writing reflects a lot about her personal encounters

within the Philippines.

 To understand her essays better, the reader must know her background
first so that they may know the reasons behind her dilemmas
 CONTEXTUAL READING
APPROACHES
2. Literary Reading through a
Sociocultural Context
• note the year or period it was written
• identify the historical events that
took place in that year
• find out the roots of an event’s cause
and the reasons behind the
character’s motives and interests
• Reading using the sociocultural context
helps you understand the social,
economic, political, and cultural forces
affecting the work that you are reading.
• Analyzing the sociocultural context of
the text makes you examine the role of
the audience (readers) in shaping
literature.
Guide questions in reading literature
through the Sociocultural Context:
• What is the relationship between the characters or the speakers in the text
and their society?
• Does the text explicitly address issues of gender, race, or class?
• How does the text resolve these issues?
• Who has the power? Who does not?
• How does this story reflect the nation?
• What does this say about the country and its inhabitants?
• Is there oppression or class struggle? How do the characters overcome this?
• Does money or finances play a large role in the narrative?
• What is the prevailing social order?
 CONTEXTUAL READING
APPROACHES
3. Literary Reading through a
Linguistic Context
• can be read through the context of
the language used to write the text as
well as the way language is used in
the text
• “The author is dead.” Reading
through a linguistic context focuses
on the language used in the literary
work and how it is used to convey
meaning.
• Reading the text on its own, regardless of the
author’s biography and sociocultural context,
may help you understand the literary text
through analyzing the words, sentences,
patterns, imagery, etc. of the text.
• Analyzing the literary text’s grammar, syntax, or
phonemic pattern may help you find the
meaning of the text within its form and help you
interpret it by simply analyzing the content of
the literary work.
Guide questions in reading literature
through the LinguisticContext:
• What were the striking words in the text?
• What words were unfamiliar to you? Which words attracted your attention?
• What words were dramatic?
• What nouns are the most prominent? Are these concrete or abstract nouns? What about
verbs?
• Does the author use common words or lofty diction? Are the words short or long?
• Is there a rhythm in the sentence structure in relation to the length of the sentences or lines?
• What literary devices are used? Are there images? Do those images stand for anything aside
from their literal meaning? What is the tone? Is the speaker happy about the subject? Is the
tone negative or positive?
• What is the structure of the text?
• What is the point of view of the text? Is it a poem?
• Does the language help in delivering and understanding its content? Is there a theme?
 CONTEXTUAL READING
APPROACHES
4. Critical Reading Strategies in
Literature

What a text says is the restatement. At first,

you simply talk about the same topic as what is
written in the original text.
What a text does is the description. Next, you See Module for Strategies and
discuss and examine the aspects of the Tips
discussion or the content of the text.
What a text means is the interpretation. As
you read critically, you should analyze the text
and assert a meaning for the text as a whole
 WORLD
LITERATURE
European literature
• refers to the literature of Europe
• also known as Western literature
• home of Homer who wrote Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil who
wrote the Aeneid, Dante who wrote Divine Comedy,
Chaucer who wrote Canterbury Tales
Eavan Boland • Eavan Boland was born in
Dublin, Ireland, in 1944.
• One of Ireland's preeminent
contemporary poets, she is the
author of A Poet's
Dublin (Carcanet Press, 2014)
and A Women Without a
Country (W. W. Norton, 2014),
among others.
• She died on April 27, 2020.
 Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Poem Analysis
In the first stanza, the narrator begins the poem by asking
herself how an entire city could just disappear. How could an
entire city, animals, cars, and buildings, just melt into the
ocean--never to be seen again?
In the second stanza, the narrator again, asks how a whole city
could suddenly disappear. She reminded herself that way back
when, the world seemed "smaller", so surely a huge city
disappearing would be a big deal! The narrator then flashes
back to her old city where she grew up.
In the third stanza, the speaker thinks back to her hometown,
with the amazing food and boardwalks, and having friends to
go home to. Then the narrator makes a guess about really
happened to Atlantis.
In the fourth stanza, the narrator tells herself that it would be
impossible for an entire city to be lost. Then she guesses that
maybe, Atlantis is just a symbol that people made up to
describe the feeling of losing something, and never getting it
back.
In the fifth and final stanza, the narrator convinces herself that
Atlantis is just a metaphor, used to give emotions a name and a
reason-not an actual city.
 WORLD
LITERATURE
Latin American Literature

• a period of literary flourishing in the 1960s and 70s

• Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, as well

as Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and Argentine prose
writer Jorge Luis Borges laid the foundation for the Latin
American Boom
Gabriel García Márquez • a Colombian novelist, short-story
writer, screenwriter and
(1927-2014) journalist, known affectionately
as Gabo throughout Latin
America

• Considered one of the most

significant authors of the 20th
century and one of the best in
the Spanish language
CRITICIAL ANALYSIS
 WORLD
LITERATURE
African Literature
• defined by their long history of colonization, to gaining
independence and now, the rise of present-day
globalization
Chinua Achebe • a Nigerian novelist, professor, and
critic
• rose to critical acclaim when he
published his magnum opus,
Things Fall Apart -the most widely
read book in African literature
• a titled Igbo chief who was given
scholarships to attend universities,
until he invested in his writing
• has taught in Western Universities
and has also dabbled in African
politics
 WORLD
LITERATURE
The Filipino-Chinese in World Literature

• Ethnic Chinese and Native Filipinos have interacted with

each other since the 9th century

• the history of the Chinese and Filipinos is very much

intertwined not only in local history, but in world history as
well

• almost 20-30% of our culture has Chinese ancestry

Charlson Ong • a Filipino-Chinese writer who has
penned award-winning works in
Philippine literature
• a well-known fictionist who has
published collections of his short
stories
• best known, however, for his novels
Embarrassment of Riches (2002),
Banyaga: A Song of War (2006), and
Blue Angel, White Shadow (2010)
• currently teaches at the University
of the Philippines-Diliman
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