21st CENTURY LITERATURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD

REVIEWER/POINTERS FOR FINAL EXAM

S.Y.2023-2024

I. THE MODERN LITERARY GENRES USED BY 21st-CENTURY WRITERS

Comic Book
-A comic book is an illustration-based extract from a longer serialized tale.
-Archie Comics, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics are examples of well-known comic
book companies.
Digi-Fiction/Triple Media Literature
-Contains three types of media: a book, a movie/video, and an online website.
-Students must navigate, read, and watch in all three modes to understand the
complete tale.
Graphic Novels
-Narrative work in which the reader is told the tale through the use of comics.
-All of the main elements of traditional books may be found in graphic novels.
-It features a distinct beginning, middle, and end point, as well as a primary plot,
character development, and personal journeys.
Manga (Japanese word for comics)
-Manga is a Japanese term for comic books.
-It is a general phrase in the English
-speaking world for all Japanese-published comic books and graphic novels.
-As an artistic and narrative technique.
-Ameri-manga – sometimes used to refer to comics created by American artists in
manga style.
• Shonen - Boy’s Manga (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece)
• Shojo – Girl’s Manga (Sailor Moon)
• Seinen – Men’s Manga (Akira)
• Josei – Women’s Manga (Loveless, Paradise Kiss)
• Kodomo – Children’s Manga (Doraemon, Hel
Doodle Fiction
-Literary presentation in which the author uses doodle writing and drawings, as well as
handwritten images, instead of regular typeface.
-Drawings improve the tale by frequently providing hilarious parts that would be absent
if the pictures were not present.
Text-Talk Novels
-Blog, email, IM format narratives Stories are told almost completely in dialogue
simulating social network exchanges.
Chick Lit or Chick Literature
-Is a subgenre of literature that confronts the difficulties of modern women in a funny
and cheerful manner.
-Chick it usually has a female heroine whose femininity is extensively thermalized in the
storyline.
Flash Fiction
-It is a fictional writing form that tells a whole tale with 500-1000 words.
-There is no universally agreed definition of the category's length. It may be anything
from a single word to a thousand.
Science Fiction
-Is a speculative fiction genre that deals with innovative themes such as futuristic
science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster-than-light travel, parallel
universes, and extraterrestrial life.
-It has been referred to as a "literature of ideas" since it frequently investigates the
potential ramifications of scientific and other discoveries.
Blog
-A web log is a website that contains small articles called posts that are updated on a
regular basis.
-Some blogs are written by a single individual and include their own thoughts, hobbies,
and experiences, whilst others are published by a group of people.
Creative Non-Fiction
-Also referred to as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction.
-A type of writing that employs literary methods and styles to generate factually correct
tales.
-In contrast to other non-fiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is likewise
based on true facts but is not created largely for the sake of its skill.
Hyper Poetry
-Hyper Poetry is a type of digital poetry that use links and hypertext markup.
-It can either feature fixed words, phrases, lines, and so on that are given in a random
order but sit on the page in the same way that traditional poetry does, or it might include
sections of the poem that move and/or mutate
Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction is often used as an umbrella term for genre fiction or for narratives
that do not fully belong in a particular science fiction or fantasy genre. I have even seen
it referred to as a “super genre,” for its broadness. Under this classification, it can
include literary fiction with fantastical elements as well as hardcore science fiction,
fantasy, and horror. Also, there is the distinction that not all of certain genres, such as
horror or science fiction, is speculative.

II. Asian Literature

o -Asian literature encompasses the rich and widely diverse cultural and ethnic
heritages found in such countries as China, India, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and
more
  -Asian literature also shows the impact of immigrating to a new country,
with the Asian characters trying to retain their previous cultures and
adjust to new situations.
o -It provides readers with opportunities to explore various cultures through a wide
variety of literary genres.
What is Asian Literature composed of?
The literature of Asia is rich collection of stories that both reflect the beliefs, culture, and
feeling of the people. Asian literature can be classified as lyrics, drama, or narrative, and
it usually reflect predominant culture and philosophies of a particular epoch.

The Following Lit. works are the highlight Asian Literature;

Rashomon Summary
A Rainy Evening in Kyōto
On a rainy evening a recently dismissed servant sits beneath the Rashomon gate of Kyōto. It is
near the end of the Heian period (794–1185). After earthquakes and fires, the capital is in such
decline that, according to old records, people sell smashed Buddhist statues for firewood. The
Rashomon gate is in disrepair, with peeling lacquer. It has become a disreputable hideout for
thieves and a dumping ground for corpses. Though the narrator opens by stating that the servant
is waiting for the rain to end, the servant actually has no idea what he will do after the rain stops.
Without work, he may be forced to become a thief. The servant worries at a growing pimple.
Because he has nowhere to go, he decides to go up to the room above the gate to try to sleep. He
doesn't expect to find anyone alive there. Halfway up the stairway he sees a light and realizes
someone else is already in the room. Feeling "six parts terror and four parts curiosity," he creeps
up to the top. To describe the feeling of the man's hair standing on end. Above, male and female
corpses are piled grotesquely on top of each other. An old woman in a rust-colored robe moves
among the dead. She plants a burning pine stick into the floor for light and begins to pull hair
from the head of a dead woman.
Confronting the Old Woman
The man is morally horrified, and he feels "a revulsion for all things evil." Though he had just
been considering becoming a robber, his feeling of righteous horror convinces him he would
rather starve than debase himself by stealing. He draws his sword and confronts the old woman,
who stumbles over the corpses as she tries to flee. He grabs her. They fight among the corpses,
but he easily overcomes her.
Realizing he has the power of life and death over the old woman, the servant's anger dissipates,
and he feels righteously satisfied and benevolent. He tells her he is not with the Magistrate's
Office; he is only a fellow traveler and will not arrest her. After a moment she tells him she has
been taking the hair to make a wig. When she sees he is disgusted, she attempts to justify herself
by saying the corpses were people who had done bad things as well. The woman whose hair she
is stealing used to sell snake meat as fish before she died in the epidemic. The old woman doesn't
blame the dead woman; both of them have done what they must to survive.
Becoming a Thief
The servant fidgets with his pimple again as he listens. "A new kind of courage began to
germinate in his heart," the narrator says. However, it is the opposite of the courage brought on
by his earlier revulsion. He has now decided to be a thief. He mocks the old woman, saying she
must then also understand what he is doing. He steals her robe and leaves her naked among the
corpses, kicking her on his way out. When she rises to look out into the night after him, she sees
only darkness. The narrator says no one knows what happened to the servant.
Mahabharata- It is known as one of the world’s longest literary works.
Upanishads- means sitting down near a vision of an interconnected universe with single unifying
principle behind the apparent diversity in the cosmos,any articulation of which is called
Brahman.

Li Bai- pronounced as Li Bo

He is thought of as one of the greatest romantic poets of China.

His poems reflect the hard realities of war, dying people living next to rich rulers, and primitive rural life.

Li- Bai Lit.works;

Good Fellowship
The Green Water
The Jewel Stair’s Grievance

III. Anglo- American Lit.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth (1770 –1850)

-Poem Analysis
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” argues for a strong connection between experience,
imagination, and language. The poem itself is a memory, focused on bringing the speaker's
experience of seeing daffodils back to life on the page through the concentrated power of the
imagination. Like nature, the imagination was an integral part of the poetic universe of the
Romantics, and in this poem, the speaker shows the way in which a strong imagination—using
the “inward eye” of the mind—can bring back pleasant memories, create joy in the present, and
even pass joy along to others.

The poem is told retrospectively, with all the verbs up until the final stanza in the past tense: the
speaker is looking back on an experience from the past. It is, then, an effort on the speaker’s part
not just to recall an experience, but to breathe new life into it through the imagination. The
speaker doesn’t only want to acknowledge the experience, but somehow give it life again and, in
turn, conjure that same joyful feeling.

The success of this goal depends on the speaker and the reader working together. The speaker
strives to bring their experience with the daffodils into life on the page, and the reader is asked to
use their imagination to make this work. The reader, then, is called on to use their own “inward
eye,” just as the speaker describes in the final stanza. Primarily, this interplay between the
speaker's imagination and the reader's imagination is dependent on the personification of the
daffodils that runs throughout the poem. The speaker describes the daffodils as having human
characteristics, which are not meant to be taken literally but instead imaginatively. For example,
the “dancing” of the daffodils, referenced in every stanza, is actually just the effect of the wind.
But dancing, of course, is an inherently joyful activity. The speaker perceives visual similarities
between the daffodils’ movement and dance, and this imaginative leap deepens the speaker's own
connection to the experience. In essence, imagining the daffodils are dancing makes the
speaker feel more alive by witnessing the life in everything else.

The speaker also projects human emotion onto the daffodils: “jocund company” (jocund means
cheerful). Of course, the daffodils don’t experience the world in this way—the speaker is seeing
their own state of mind reflected back in the visual effect of the flowers. That imaginative leap
heightens the experience, arguably making the speaker feel a stronger connection to nature. The
poem in turn asks the reader to go through the same process. The reason for doing so is clear
from the final stanza. Here, the speaker describes being in a “vacant” or “pensive” mood— in
other words, these are times in which the speaker feels disengaged and detached from the world.
Of course, the imagination is the speaker's salvation—the image of the daffodils comes rushing
back, and even further, the speaker imaginatively goes back to the daffodils and “dances” with
them. The poem, then, argues that such imaginative acts can have positive effects for the reader,
too. Encouraging the reader toward imagination becomes the justification for the use of
personification, conceptualization, and poetic language that has come before. These choices
weren't just about describing the daffodils, but about engaging the reader’s imagination in
experiencing them. Throughout, the speaker links imagination to happiness, particularly in its
capacity to bring memories, if not back to life, into new life. The experience of the daffodils
lives on in the speaker’s and then the reader’s imagination. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is,
then, an imaginative attempt to not just recreate the speaker's experience, but to extend it into the
mind of the reader. The poem argues that this process is an important part of what it means to be
human and, moreover, happy.

IV. European Literature Paradise Lost

Neoclassicism John Milton
The period is characterized by the use of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, relies
elaborate language, wit, and artificiality, on the underlying structure of ancient epics to
often associated with the works of poets like portray the Christian worldview as noble and
Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? heroic, arguing that God’s actions, for people
who might question them, are justified, hinting
Medieval that humankind’s fall serves God’s greater
purposes. In his retelling of Adam and Eve’s
"Gothic literature" story, Milton suggests that disobedience to God
leads to spiritual exile, allowing evil in all its
manifestations to enter the world, which, in turn, "Weep Not, Child" is a poignant novel that explores
offers necessary opportunities for redemption. the socio-political landscape of colonial Kenya and its
impact on the lives of ordinary individuals. The
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." narrative centers around Njoroge, a young boy from a
-Satan's famous declaration in "Paradise Lost" Kikuyu family, growing up amidst the turbulence of the
expressing his determination to endure suffering Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule.
and continue the fight against God. The story begins with Njoroge's childhood, marked by
Theodicy -is the defense of divine the stark disparities between the lives of the native
omnipotence and perfect goodness in the light of Kikuyu people and the British settlers. Njoroge's
the problem of evil and suffering in the world. In father works for a white landowner, and the family
the words of Milton's famous preface to Paradise struggles with poverty and the challenges imposed by
Lost colonialism. Despite the hardships, Njoroge harbors a
deep desire for education, a dream that his father
Hamlet by William Shakespeare is thought to supports despite the odds. As Njoroge progresses in
be one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all his education, he encounters the complexities of
times. This play contains a lot of things which identity and resistance. The Mau Mau uprising, a
make it amazing work. Hamlet by William movement seeking independence for Kenya, serves
Shakespeare portrays a lot of characters and as a backdrop to the narrative. Njoroge's brothers
things which reveal the atmosphere of become involved in the rebellion, leading to a fracture
uncertainty, horror, death, mystery, and within the family and a deepening sense of loss. The
instability of the nature of all the characters. novel delves into tradition, modernity, and the cost of
pursuing independence. Njoroge's personal journey
“To be or not to be” reflects the broader struggles of a nation striving for
self-determination. The impact of political unrest on
Famous soliloquy in Hamlet contemplates the
nature of life, death, and the pains of existence. familial relationships, cultural identity, and individual
aspirations is a central focus of the narrative.
Horatio- Loyal friend of Hamlet who is known Throughout the novel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o skillfully
for his wit humor, weaves together the personal and political, offering
readers a nuanced portrayal of the human experience
Chinua Achebe- father of modern African during a tumultuous period in Kenya's history. "Weep
literature. Not, Child" serves as a powerful exploration of the
intersection between personal aspirations and the
collective fight for freedom.

Globalization Identity, Resistance, advocacy for Human

Rights
Is one of the prominent theme often explored in
African literature, especially in the post- the dominant theme in Latin American
Literature.
colonial .
Pablo Neruda

He was the Chilean poet, diplomat, and

politician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1971 whose known for his Veinte
poemas de amor y una cancion desperada .