MODULE: OLLITE001– PHILIPPINE LITERATURE

READING AND INTERPRETING THE LITERARY TEXTS

A. Develop a thorough understanding about reading and interpreting the literary texts;
B. Understand the reading process as well as the strategies of developing reading
awareness for effective reading of literary texts;
C. Apply the skills and strategies of reading to various forms of literary texts and types of
literary content by achieving reading readiness .

WAYS OF LOOKING AT LITERATURE CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON LITERATURE

CATEGORIES OF OBSERVATIONS QUESTIONS

Who wrote this?
The Writer's Life What kind of person was he or she?
How old was the writer when the poem was written?
In what place and time was it written?
What was going on at the time?
The Writer's Culture
What events and ideas were important?
What was the world view?
How many parts are there to this work?
The Work How are they related?
Structure, Techniques What key words images, figures of speech, are
important?
Who is talking here? To whom?
What is their relationship like?
Characters or Speaker
What motivates them?
What conflict do they have?

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What ideas or lessons are expressed or implied
here?
Ideas, lessons, philosophy What values?
What forces have determined these events?
What are we supposed to learn?
How does it make me feel?
The Reader
What features of the work stand out?
Yourself as a Reader
What happens to me when I read this?
What is the present world view in the place where I
Your Culture am situated?
What events and ideas are important
Does this refer to historical events?
Historical Perspectives
Is it about something or somebody in the past?
What does this remind me of?
Artistic/Literary Tradition How is it related to other works, storylines,
characters, or myths?

1. Text - Oriented Approach A reader may analyze a work of

literature as complete in itself
without relating to it that outside
of the world.
2. Author - Oriented Approach A reader may study an author's
life, time and culture to better
understand the author's work.

3. Reader - Oriented Approach This approach requires research.

Each reader brings a unique set
of experience and expectations
to literature in its extreme form.

THREE BASIC APPROACHES TO INTERPRET LANGUAGE

Literary Appreciation is a form of close reading that involves the analysis

and evaluation of literary work. All literary works are inscribed in language,
the readers must have sufficient understanding of linguistic elements before
they can make that judgment.
A literary text is a contrived utterance that addresses several levels of
reality.
To communicate through this text, the writer and reader must put into
operation certain processes that will make the text intelligible.
But the utterance, it must be remembered, is first of all, a linguistic construction, fixed and specific, thus
demanding of both writers and readers an expertise in language.

There are three levels of reality any reader must consider to make his appreciation of the literary text valid
and fruitful:

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Grammatical ate Metaphoric significance

Compositional (Second Level) - produces
Knowledge (First additional meanings when
(3) The world of literature itself, it
Level) - clears away harmonized with the literal
must be apparent... has a big part in
impediments to the elements. Here, figurative
literary appreciation - this (Third
comprehension of language processes
level) exerts a tremendous pressure
the works literalness, literalness to make it yield
on the mind and heart, compelling
that is, the human additional facets of
them to examine things in a newer
condition as expressions or clarifies,
manner. In fact, all existing literary
articulated through intensifies, and elaborates
discourses are invoked when one
concrete and on basic meanings without
appreciates a text.
physical verbality. contravening or cancelling
them.

PHILEN HANDOUTS,
DLSU-CSB)

1. A text acquires meaning only in the imagination of an actual reader, which is you, with your experience,
memories and dreams.
2. One of the ways you can read a text is to look at readings made by other people.
You can read reviews or critical accounts of the text. You can try to step away from yourself, and see how you
are reading, you may even go a step further and try to be sensitive to the role of language in the way you read.
3. A lot depends on why you are reading a text. If you are reading only to satisfy a class requirement, you may
want look into the uses of power in the classroom.
You could look at the way certain texts working together in exert power over all others. You may even look at
certain imperialist countries that exert power over post-colonial minds such as yours. If you are reading in order
to gain knowledge, you could look into how the text reveals this knowledge, how it relates to the world that you
live in, how it interacts with other texts in society.
You are not the first person to read a literary text. There have been many others who have asked the kinds of
questions you now ask of the text. Literary history is the branch of knowledge that deals with these questions.
Everyone who reads a literary text necessarily adopts one of these theories even without knowing it. It is like
the difference between someone who plays the piano by ear and someone who has taken music lessons; the
former may appreciate a musical piece, but the latter knows why a musical piece is appealing.
6. You can understand a novel, poem, or a play even if you do not study literary theory, but if you study literary
theory or at least some aspects of literary criticism, you will understand why you understand, how you
understand, and maybe even what you understand.

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PNU Teacher's Guide,

2002)

1. Literary Theories
✓ In "reading" and analyzing literature, literary theories are needed to support the reader in understanding
the texts.
✓ Generally, literary critics clustered these theories or approaches into five groups. (PNU Teachers
Guide)
a. Mimetic Theory - based on the classical Aristotelian idea that literature imitates or reflects the real world or
the world of ideal concepts or things from which subject of literature is derived. The work and the world that
imitates is how others call this theory.
b. Authorial Theory - holds that the author is the sole source of meaning. One studies literature with one eye
set on literary text and another eye on the author's biography. The work in relation to its author insists on very
private expression of the writer's feelings, imagination, inspiration, and intention.
c. Reader Response Theory - is also called as effective or pragmatic theory. Some call this as the work and
its readers. This theory permits varied and numerous interpretations of the literary texts from as many
readers.
d. Literary Tradition Theory - relates the work to its literary history by identifying the tradition to which it
belongs.
e. Textual Analysis Theory - this theory is also known as the work as an entity in itself.
NOTE: In recent times, even though theories are considered important, earlier new criticisms and reader-
response theories, popular in the late period are less and less used in recent times... and the "NO THEORY"
position of latter-day critics, and like, are interesting fields of interrogation for students.

2. Literary Criticism - refers to the individual's way of reading a literary text.

➢ New Criticism or Formalist Criticisms (was considered new in the 1930"s)
▪ seeks to make literary criticism a scientific study
▪ Insists that each literary work shows function as a harmonious possessing a universal meaning,
which suggests that there is only one "correct" way of [Link]
▪ Meaning is revealed by "dissecting" the literary text, by examining the literary elements and by
determining how it contributed to the essential unity of the literary piece.
▪ Strength: calls for a careful and thorough reading of the text.
▪ Weakness: ignores the relationship of one story to another, the interconnection of literature, the
influence of society to literature, and the importance of the author's individualism.
▪ Denies the impact of the reader's personal experience.
➢ Archetypal criticism is influenced by Carl Gustav Jung's belief in the collective unconscious of
all the people of the world.
▪ Identifies certain archetypes, which are simple repeated patterns or images of human
experience: the changing seasons, the cce of birth, death, rebirth and heroic quest.
▪ Depends heavily on symbols and patterns operating on a universal scale.
▪ Uses Northrop Frye's assertion that literature consists of variation on a great mythic theme that
contains the following elements:
1. The creation and life is a paradise: garden
2. A displacement from a paradise: alienation
3. A time trial and tribulation, usually a wandering: a journey
4. A self discovery as a result of the struggle: an epiphany
5. A return to paradise: either the original or a new improved one.
➢ Historicism - examines the culture and society from which literature is produced, and how thee

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influence affect literature.
• Who is the author, where did he/ she come from, and what were his / her objectives in writing?
How did the political events influences what the writer wrote?
• How did the predominant social customs of the time influence the writer's outlook?
• What is the predominant philosophy that influenced the work?
• Where there any special circumstances under which the work was written?
• Strength: enriches one's understanding of literature because a knowledge of the historical times in
which a piece is written.
• Weakness: overlooks the literary elements and structure as well as the author's individual
contribution.
➢ Marxist criticism has the longest history being a 20th century phenomenon.
• Argues that literature is a product of real, social and economic existence
• Views literature to be ideologically determined, usually of dominant social class.
• Insists that literature must be used to challenge class oppression.
• Use's Moa Tse Tung's ideas that literature must answer
• Whom to serve: The working people, the masses.
• How to serve: Awaken and arouse the masses and impel them to unite and struggle to change
their environment.
• Strength: provides functional cultural and political agenda of literature.
• Weakness: opens up the possibility of prioritizing content over form, ideological criterion over
artistic.
➢ Feminist criticism combines several critical methods while focusing on the questions on how
gender affects a literary work, writer, or reader.
• How are women portrayed in the work? As stereotypes? As individuals?
• How is the woman's point of view considered?
• Is the male superiority implied in the text?
• In what way is the work affected because it was written by a woman?
• Strength: enriches a reading by showing awareness of the complexity of human interaction.
• Weakness: ultimately culturally criticism.
➢ Structuralism is based on the linguistie theories of Ferdinand Saussure and cultural theories of
Claude levi-Strauss
• Language is a well contained system of signs. (Saussure)
• Culture, like languages, could be viewed as system of signs and could be analyzed in terms of the
structural relations among their elements. (levi-Strauss)
• Views literary text as systems of interlocking signs which are arbitrary.
• Seeks to make explicit the "grammar" (the rules and codes or system of organization).
• Uses the concept of binary oppositions (sign-signifier, parole-langue, performance-competence).
• Believes that a sign (something which stands to somebody for something) can never have a
definite meaning, because the meaning must be continuously qualified.
• Strength: allows intertextuality and links literary text to systems of signs that exist even before the
work is written.
• Weakness: denies author's individual c contribution.
➢ Deconstruction was initiated by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960's.
• Assumes that language refers only to itself rather than to an extratextual reality.
• Asserts multiple conflicting interpretations o a text.
• Bases interpretation on the philosophical, political or social implications of the use of language in a
text rather than on the author's intentions.
• Involves the questioning of the many hierarchical oppositions (binary oppositions) in order to
expose the bias of privilege terms.
• Takes apart the logic of language in which authors make their claims.
• Reveals how all texts undermine themselves in that every text includes unconscious "traces" of
other positions exactly opposite to that which it sets out to uphold

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• Strength: debunjs the idea of the arbitraries of the verbal sign and loosens up language from concepts and
referents.
• Weakness: views that the "meaning" of the text bears only accidental relationship to the author's conscious
intentions.

(Venando L. Mendiola and Ma. Antionette C. Montealegre, PNU, Manila)

Critics usually call our attention to interesting thing going on in the work of art.
Aristotle's definition of Criticism - it is a standard of judging well, the most essential part is to observe those
excellences which should delight a reasonable reader.

The function of a critic according to Sylvan Barnet are:

1. Introduce readers to authors or works of which they are not aware.
2. Convince readers that they have understand an author or work because they have not read them carefully
enough.
3. Show readers the relation between works of different ages each cultures which they could never have seen
for themselves because they have limited knowledge.
4. Give a "reading" of a work which increases the readers' understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic "making."
6. Throw light upon the relation of art of life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

Venancio L. Mendiola and Ma. Antionette C. Montealegre, PNU, Manila

Three Parts of any Narrative (Story/Novel)

1. Introduction
2. Complication
3. Resolution

A classic example illustrating these three parts is the story by O. Henry "The Gift of the Magi".

INTRODUCTION the reader is introduced to a young wife who has only $1.87 and wife and
a husband whose only treasure were his watch and a precious wife.
COMPLICATION usually a conflict of opposed wills or forces.
It starts when she sells her hairt to buy a watch for his husband, only to
find her husband has bought her a set of comb in exchange of his watch.
RESOLUTION “Two foolish children in a flat who unwisely sacrificed for each other the
great treasure of their house.’’ Every reader who enjoyed the story “The
Gift of Magi” will always remember the surprise ending.

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(Chuck Gomez, Ateneo de Manila University)

1. Read the poem aloud

Always do this so you can hear the sound of the poem and get a sensory feel of it. The net effect,
too, is that you hone your auditory imagination.
2. When you read a poem, start with just the text:
a. On the most literal level of meaning, what's going on or what is the poem about?
b. To read the text in other ways, or to go beyond the literal meaning, examine:
o Images- to examine images, imagine them. What do they look, taste, feel sound or smell
like?
o Methapors - are generally a matter of comparing one thing to another.
o Tone of Voice - comes from choice of words diction, syntax and rhythm.
o Structure of the poem - which mark shifts in thought, the way paragraphs do and stanzas
how lines are cut, every line is a unit of meaning, in free verse. There are two basic line cuts:
end-stopped where lines are cut at its natural syntactical cut or where there is punctuation.
o Rhyme and meter.
o Choice of words or diction.

3. Other points of words or diction

Apparently in poetry, the syllable, word, line and stanza constitute units of meaning.
Punctuation and line cuts (whether punctuated or not) imply pauses of various lengths. A period is the longest
pause and gives a line a sense of finality, a comma is shorter, etc. When you look the line, remember that the
first and last words have the greatest weight, i.e. there is an emphasis.

SAMPLE READING
THE PORTRAIT
Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgive my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a ling-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek still burning.

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NOTES ON THE ABOVE POEM:
Literal level notes:
- basic situation - a family, 3 people: father, mother, child; father killed himself in public before child was born;
"mother" never forgives "father"; child senses
"mother" still thinks about and feels for "father" and "mother" slaps child and tears photo; years later, child still
remembers the slapping.
persona - speaker in the poem is the child, year later; sex or gender of the child is not explicit in the text.
- no specific setting or time or atmosphere, except the narrative of the poem takes place in some country
where there are focus seasons("spring").

Guttierrez-Ang, J. (2012). Philippine Literature: A Course Reader.