20 research outputs found
The Poetics of elsewhere: Conchitina Cruz, held and lingered
No full textAn undergraduate study on the poetics of Conchitina Cruz in her collection elsewhere held and lingered. Composed of a memoir that attempts to trace the poet\u27s creative life and discussion of selected poems from the collection, this paper identities Cruz\u27s poetics as the poetics of elsewhere, in its departure from the conventions of poetry writing and postcolonial dis-course, by foregrounding the poetic race in relation to Filipino-ness. Consequently, in her deliberate attempt to dis-place her writing, Cruz re-fines anglophone writing as perpetually elsewhere lingering despite its being held and owned, and as perpetually fed by the lingering voices tht surround its productions
Locating desire in the intertextual and footnote prose poems of Conchitina Cruz from her collection Dark hours
No full textThis paper studies seven prose poems from Conchitina Cruz\u27s collection Dark Hours. Using Catherine Belsey\u27s synthesis of the articulation of the theory of desire by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida from her book Desire : Love Stories in Western Culture, the study shows how the proposed reading paradigm helps in understanding Cruz\u27s prose poems through the identification of the features which aid in the blurring of the two genres. Applying the theory of desire, the study reads the prose poems with careful respect to their form, not privileging their content over it, examines their different S/subject positions, and determines whether they are postmodern texts which foreground the implications of difference. The features identified from the prose poems namely the use of disjointed scenes, double narratives, materiality of sounds, meta-narratives, the pronoun you, intertextuality and footnotes lend the prose poems open-endedness, self-reflexive tendencies and writerly roles for the reader. In this manner, the texts subvert the boundaries of genre of prose and poetry and question the role of the reader in the construction of meaning in the texts
The Static City: The Portrayal of Stasis in Conchitina Cruz’s Dark Hours
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The project of this study is to examine the techniques employed in the writing and arrangement of poems in a collection that presents a characteristic societal flaw of a particular place and its representative people and culture. My particular city of interest is Manila, and the particular characteristic flaw of this city that I intend to focus on is stasis.
The primary text I will be analyzing is Dark Hours, a collection of prose poems by Conchitina Cruz. The kind of stasis presented in Dark Hours is not necessarily a lack of movement; it is principally the city’s lack of progress that is portrayed. Although the name of the city in Dark Hours is not specified, certain details in the text indicate that the city being written about is Manila. I have chosen Dark Hours because its characterization of stasis may be seen not just in the individual poems but also in the way the poems are arranged in the collection. The result is that while in each poem the stasis is presented through a particular situation or incident involving a single character, when read as a collection, the poems form a complete picture of the city’s condition as it is influenced by its residents’ actions and as it influences its residents’ lives
The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines
Get PDFAccording to Merlie Alunan, the writers Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, founders of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, have so influenced Philippine literary production that the latter half of the twentieth century and “a few more decades hereafter” can be called “The Tiempo Age.” This essay examines the relationship of aesthetics and politics in institutionalized creative writing in the Philippines by unpacking the politics of the Silliman Workshop’s autonomous aesthetics. It situates the origins, pedagogy, and imagined community of the Silliman Workshop within the network of American colonial education in the Philippines, American cultural diplomacy, and institutionalized creative writing in the United States. It explores how New Criticism, as appropriated by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop-trained Tiempos, conflates the autonomy of the literary text with the autonomy of the literary space in which it is produced. The lack of institutional self-critique authorized by this conflation results in the propagation by the Silliman Workshop of colonialist and classist ideas about language and literary production, which are camouflaged, if not naturalized, as principles and mechanisms integral to the craft of writing. The essay calls on the successors of the Tiempos who currently run the Silliman Workshop to scrutinize the historical contingency of the aesthetic values they inherited and to revise their New Critical pedagogy, which continues to uphold the primacy of English as the language of creative writing education and literary production
Authoring autonomy: The politics of art for art's sake in Filipino poetry in English
No full textThis study examines the autonomy of art as a governing principle in the artistic practice of Filipino poets in English. The Western modernist ideal of art for art’s sake was transplanted to the Philippines via the educational system implemented during the American occupation in the early twentieth century. As appropriated in colonial Philippines, what is historically regarded as a form of artistic resistance to the capitalist and rapidly industrializing society of the West is traditionally read as a withdrawal of participation by colonial and postcolonial literary writers from the political realm. The writer who subscribes to art for art’s sake supposedly fetishizes form in itself and simply has no stake in lived realities and no role in the production of a national literature. Authoring Autonomy interrogates the division between aesthetics and politics that occurs when the autonomy of art is presumed to be incompatible with the work of social transformation. It accounts for the potential and limits of autonomy as a form of critical intervention through studying the work of three Filipino poets: José Garcia Villa, Edith Tiempo, and Jose F. Lacaba. Drawing from the work of critics who have problematized the politics of aesthetic autonomy, including Theodor Adorno and Roberto Schwarz, this study examines how Filipino poets have authored autonomy in ways that comply with, disturb, or resist the status quo. It also includes a poetics essay and a collection of poetry, which articulate, both critically and creatively, my poetic practice as informed by my understanding of how autonomy is authored in ways that are cognizant of postcolonial conditions and anxieties
Authoring autonomy : the politics of art for art\u27s sake in Filipino poetry in English
Get PDFThis study examines the autonomy of art as a governing principle in the artistic practice of Filipino poets in English. The Western modernist ideal of art for art’s sake was transplanted to the Philippines via the educational system implemented during the American occupation in the early twentieth century. As appropriated in colonial Philippines, what is historically regarded as a form of artistic resistance to the capitalist and rapidly industrializing society of the West is traditionally read as a withdrawal of participation by colonial and postcolonial literary writers from the political realm. The writer who subscribes to art for art’s sake supposedly fetishizes form in itself and simply has no stake in lived realities and no role in the production of a national literature. Authoring Autonomy interrogates the division between aesthetics and politics that occurs when the autonomy of art is presumed to be incompatible with the work of social transformation. It accounts for the potential and limits of autonomy as a form of critical intervention through studying the work of three Filipino poets: José Garcia Villa, Edith Tiempo, and Jose F. Lacaba. Drawing from the work of critics who have problematized the politics of aesthetic autonomy, including Theodor Adorno and Roberto Schwarz, this study examines how Filipino poets have authored autonomy in ways that comply with, disturb, or resist the status quo. It also includes a poetics essay and a collection of poetry, which articulate, both critically and creatively, my poetic practice as informed by my understanding of how autonomy is authored in ways that are cognizant of postcolonial conditions and anxieties
