KEY IDEAS NOTES

7. Dante’s four approaches  literal, symbolic, moral, analogical

8. Critical Reading  Close reading, which is essential to

intelligent critical thinking, is considered
a fanatical, extravagant preoccupation.
 The heart of critical interpretation is
critical reading.

 Impressionistic approach
9. Uncritical Reading
 Example: Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, one
of the judges in the Philippines Free Press
short story contest

 “a confusion between the poem and its

10. Affective Fallacy result (what it is and what it does)
 Example: “it moved me most”.

 Teodoro Locsin’s Critical introduction to

Nick Joaquin’s first book, “Summer
11. Impressionistic attitude Solstice.”
 Overrating Manuel Arguilla - does not
achieve a full-bodied realization of the
short story genre in many of his works.

12. Optimum Emotional Impact  to juxtapose contrasting scenes or

situations.
 Example: murder of King Duncan
a. Hazlitt’s comment – textual criticism

13. Critical Fallacy  confused focus on a man and his work.

14. Critic to Carlos’ Bulosan Work  U. P. Creative Writing Center

 1990 National Fellow in Fiction
 Indeed much of Bulosan’s writing has
something to do with Filipino workers in
the Pacific coast, but his articulation is
inartistic, and he has no sense of form.
15. Jose Garcia Villa  The unquestioned literary dictator in the
Philippines in the 1930s.
 Criteria for selecting best stories of the year:
 The test of substance requires vitality of
subject, significant selection of facts. To
achieve validity, therefore, substance in
fiction should be living as well as significant.
 The second test that I employ is that of form.
This requires vigor of structure and artistic
finish.
 KEY IDEAS NOTES
 Tiempo’s writing in 1946 at Writers
16. Critics to The Tuba Gatherer Workshop at University of Iowa as a first-
year fellow.
 The panel, Robert Penn, said that author’s
prose was competent, yet he added that its
author did not seem to know short story
structure.
 Joaquin’s melodramatic delineation of
17. Critics to The Legend on the Dying Currito’s thoughts before dying is
Wanton meretricious for lack of internal consistency.
 Authorial manipulation results in a nauseous
18. Critic to the Summer Solstice
pathetic melodrama.
 What Locsin calls Joaquin’s “cage of
19. Critic to the Guardia de Honor glittering words” has indeed become
Joaquin’s prison.
20. Pathetic Fallacy  They produce in us a falseness in all our
impressions of external things, which I would
generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic
Fallacy.
 a work’s emotive quality must not assault the
21. What is a good literature? sensibility, it must be undergirded by
reasonableness, by logic, it must complement
and satisfy the intellect, it must have
inevitability.
 Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Henry
James - writers
22. Oversimplification  Reason (the traditional policy of magazine
editors to limit short story manuscripts, for
instance, to about 12 manuscript pages,
double-spaced.
 Arguilla’s “Midsummer” - best example.
 Too-neatly structured story whose life is choked
by obvious manipulation.
 A flute rendition without a counterpoint.
 Jean-Pierre Rampal
 • “The Centipede,” a Palanca award winner by
Rony
 Diaz published in the 1953 Literary Apprentice,

SUMMARY
In this essay, the author has discussed:
the definition of a writer’s intention
literary evaluation through emotional reaction alone without considering the artistic necessities.
the tendency to lose perspective because of a confused focus in assessing a writer and his work.
and the limiting factors in oversimplification
 Republic of the Philippines
Philippine Normal University
The National Center for Teacher Education
Mindanao
The Multicultural Education Hub
Prosperidad, Agusan del Sur

Aiza B. LuminariasDr. Adelyne M. Costelo-Abrea

Bachelor in English Education- IV2S-ENG15- Literary Criticism

TOPIC:

LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE PHILIPPINES

By EDILBERTO K. TIEMPO

KEY IDEAS NOTES

Reasons why Criticism is most unwelcome in colonial mentality

the Philippines: oversensitiveness to criticism
lack of maturity

Literary Works of the Filipinos in 1872 were political and social amelioration
addressed to (Jose Rizal’s Novels: limited degree
religious inequality

1930 modicum of literary criticism began to emerge.

lack of critical orientation has resulted in our
clutching deconstruction and postmodernism.

There are fewer schools that offer literary

criticism.
Philippines’ school and universities that offer On the tertiary level there is probably only one
literary criticism course: school which requires literary criticism for
English and literature majors.

Associated with contemporary French

Philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930)
all texts are inherently ambiguous and subject
Deconstructionism to conflicting interpretations.
Manila deconstructionists - reader is entitled to
his own interpretation of a literary work