Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Demons, Saviours, and Narrativity in a Vernacular Literature
Get PDFNarratives from and on Panay and Negros in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines are generally called the sugilanon. Its origins are usually traced to the Visayan epics; the sugilanon receded in the background with the dominance of religio-colonial literature in the Spanish period (1660's-1898) but re-emerged as didactic narratives with the publication of popular magazines in Visayan in the 1930's. Tracking its development could be a way of writing a literary history of the region.  The last 25 years has been a particularly exciting time in its development. Young, schooled writers are now writing with the “instinctual†writers, in a variety of languages, Hiligaynon, Kiniray-a, Filipino and even English and experiments in craft are evident. The study focuses on sugilanon in this period, in particular the sub-genre utilising spiritlore as part of its imaginative repertoire. It explores the creative transformations of spirit-lore both in theme and narrative method in the sugilanon. Moreover, it seeks to explain the persistence of demons, dungans and other spirits even among writers with supposedly post-modern sensibilities. This may be attributed to residuality or to metaphorical ways of seeing. But the paper argues that spirit-lore is very much tied up with notions of social agency and historical continuity. Such questions could illuminate some aspects of narrativity in the vernacular
Death of a Tiger Moth; In Excess; Island Echoes; Robinson Jeffers’ Medea at Hobart’s Theatre Royal
No full textAlfian Sa’at, Collected Plays One: The Optic Trilogy, Fugitives, Homesick, sex. violence. blood. gore
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Creating a Nation: Peter Nazareth as Literary Critic
Get PDFPeter Nazareth is a well known literary critic of African and Third World literatures. Using his most recent book, Edwin Thumboo: Creating a Nation Through Poetry, this essay analyses Nazareth’s critical thinking and identifies three basic components. The first component establishes that Nazareth is a communal critic, indicating the desire not to have one’s own voice dominating the discourse. The second component is Nazareth’s power of synthesis, which is the driving force behind his discourse. Synthesis generally means combining two different things to create a new thing. Born from three cultures, that is, African, Malayan, and Goan, this fragmentation becomes for Nazareth an urge for bridging, which later develops into a high artistic synthesising. The third component is the delight of influence, which constantly feeds synthesis and communal criticism. Not having anxieties about being influenced, Nazareth’s power of synthesis celebrates all influences in a complex textual pluralism.Â
