Chapter 1 Introduction to the Study of Philippine Literature

Philippine literature is the literature associated with the Philippines and includes the legends of prehistory, and the colonial legacy of the Philippines. Most of the notable literature of the Philippines was written during the Spanish period and the first half of the 20th century in Spanish language. Philippine literature is written in Spanish, English, Tagalog, and/or other native Philippine languages.

It is not a secret that many Filipinos are unfamiliar with much of the country's literary heritage, especially those that were written long before the Spaniards arrived in our country. This is due to the fact that the stories of ancient time were not written, but rather passed on from generation to generation through word of mouth. Only during 1521 did the early Filipinos became acquainted with literature due to the influence of the Spaniards on us. But the literature that the Filipinos became acquainted with are not Philippine-made, rather, they were works of Spanish authors.

So successful were the efforts of colonists to blot out the memory of the country's largely oral past that present-day Filipino writers, artists and journalists are trying to correct this inequity by recognizing the country's wealth of ethnic traditions and disseminating them in schools through mass media.

Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of written work and can, in some circumstances, refer exclusively to published sources. The word literature literally means "things made from letters" and the pars pro toto term "letters" is sometimes used to signify "literature," as in the figures of speech "arts and letters" and "man of letters." Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction & non-fiction—and two major techniques—poetry and prose.

Literature may consist of texts based on factual information (journalistic or non-fiction), as well as on original imagination, such as polemical works as well as autobiography, and reflective essays as well as belles-lettres. Literature can be classified according to historical periods, genres, and political influences. The concept of genre, which earlier was limited, has broadened over the centuries.

A genre consists of artistic works which fall within a certain central theme, and examples of genre include romance, mystery, crime, fantasy, erotica, and adventure, among others. Important historical periods in English literature include Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the 17th Century Shakespearean and Elizabethan times, the 18th Century Restoration, 19th Century Victorian, and 20th Century Modernism. Important intellectual movements that have influenced the study of literature include feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, post-modernism, romanticism, and Marxism.

The rise of nationalistic pride in the 1960s and 1970s also helped bring about this change of attitude among a new breed of Filipinos concerned about the "Filipino identity."

Example of a literary work is a novel, A novel is simply a fictional story that is told in narrative form and that is book length. Novels exist throughout the world and have existed since it first became possible to print and distribute them. The story Moby Dick by Herman Melville a classic novel tells about the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. 

Ishmael soon learns that Ahab has one purpose on this voyage: to seek out Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyd Ahab's boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take revenge.

History:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known literary works. This Babylonian epic poem arises from stories in the Sumerian language. Although the Sumerian stories are older (probably dating to at least 2100 B.C.), it was probably composed around 1900 BC. The epic deals with themes of heroism, friendship, loss, and the quest for eternal life.

Different historical periods are reflected in literature. National and tribal sagas, accounts of the origin of the world and of customs, and myths which sometimes carry moral or spiritual messages predominate in the preurban eras. The epics of Homer, dating from the early to middle Iron age, and the great Indian epics of a slightly later period, have more evidence of deliberate literary authorship, surviving like the older myths through oral tradition for long periods before being written down.

As a more urban culture developed, academies provided a means of transmission for speculative and philosophical literature in early civilizations, resulting in the prevalence of literature in Ancient China, Ancient India, Persia and Ancient Greece and Rome. Many works of earlier periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit Panchatantra or the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Drama and satire also developed as urban culture provided a larger public audience, and later readership, for literary production. Lyric poetry (as opposed to epic poetry) was often the speciality of courts and aristocratic circles, particularly in East Asia where songs were collected by the Chinese aristocracy as poems, the most notable being the Shijing or Book of Songs. Over a long period, the poetry of popular pre-literate balladry and song interpenetrated and eventually influenced poetry in the literary medium.

In ancient China, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and poetry. China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing, produced one of the world's first print cultures.^[1] Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (769-269 BCE). The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Daoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzu's The Art of War) and Chinese history(e.g. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records. An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China was the Zuo Zhuan, which was compiled no later than 389 BCE, and attributed to the blind 5th century BCE historian Zuo Qiuming.

In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted. Early genres included drama, fables, sutras and epic poetry. Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 1500–1000 BCE, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India. The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts. The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500–1000 BCE, and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000-500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or theLate Bronze Age and the Iron Age.^[2] The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC saw the composition and redaction of the two most influential Indian epics, the Mahabharataand the Ramayana, with subsequent redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD.

In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Hesiod, who wrote Works and Days and Theogony, are some of the earliest, and most influential, of Ancient Greek literature. Classical Greek genres included philosophy, poetry, historiography, comedies and dramas. Plato and Aristotle authored philosophical texts that are the foundation of Western philosophy, Sappho and Pindar were influential lyrical poets, and Herodotus and Thucydides were early Greek historians. Although drama was popular in Ancient Greece, of the hundreds oftragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The plays of Aristophanes provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to define the genre.^[3]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and author of the Faust books

Roman histories and biographies anticipated the extensive mediaeval literature of lives of saints and miraculous chronicles, but the most characteristic form of the Middle Ages was the romance, an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal. Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the Renaissance as a result of the invention of printing, while the mediaeval romance developed into a more character-based and psychological form of narrative, the novel, of which early and important examples are the Chinese Monkey and the German Faust books.

In the Age of Reason philosophical tracts and speculations on history and human nature integrated literature with social and political developments. The inevitable reaction was the explosion of Romanticism in the later 18th century which reclaimed the imaginative and fantastical bias of old romances and folk-literature and asserted the primacy of individual experience and emotion. But as the 19th-century went on, European fiction evolved towards realismand naturalism, the meticulous documentation of real life and social trends. Much of the output of naturalism was implicitly polemical, and influenced social and political change, but 20th century fiction and drama moved back towards the subjective, emphasising unconscious motivations and social and environmental pressures on the individual. Writers such as Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Pirandello exemplify the trend of documenting internal rather than external realities.

Genre fiction also showed it could question reality in its 20th century forms, in spite of its fixed formulas, through the enquiries of the skeptical detectiveand the alternative realities of science fiction. The separation of "mainstream" and "genre" forms (including journalism) continued to blur during the period up to our own times. William Burroughs, in his early works, and Hunter S. Thompson expanded documentary reporting into strong subjective statements after the second World War, and post-modern critics have disparaged the idea of objective realism in general.

Introduction: 

Literature is the artistic expression of profound thoughts, which is replete with spontaneous and intense passions, imaginative ideas and reflective viewpoints of the literary men. It is exposed in such an untechnical form as to make it more comprehensible, giving aesthetic pleasure and relief to the mind of the common man. According to Lord Morely, “Literature consists of all the books where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity and attraction of form” . In other words, literature heightens our awareness of human life. It enhances our vision of life and we begin to look at nature with new eyes. It interprets with ornamental language the experiences and spiritual intuitions of man. Literature appeals us greatly due to its essential features including thought, feeling, imagination and beauty of style and form etc.

As Lowes Dickinson states implications of literature in this way: “To feel, and in order to express, or at least to understand the expressions of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end. A rose in a moonlight garden, the shadow of trees on the turf, almond blossom, scene of pine, the wine cup and guitar, these and the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides for ever away into the shadow and hush of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the gale—-to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what we call literature.” Literature is “mirror of life” an influential tool to weigh and to consider. Literature is such catalytic mechanism to inspire our thoughtful feelings and imagination. Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming character, for giving us, character armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with strong determination, courage and fortitude, and inspired by that public spirit and public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man.

In the words of Philip J. Waller , “ The literary student explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue.” All literary men like poets, dramatists, satirists, fiction writers, novelists, humorists, maxim writers, political orators, character writers and great preachers teach us how to know man and how to delve deep into the human nature.

To quote Emerson : “Literature is a record of the best thoughts.” Literature is the embodiment of written thoughts and feelings of intellectual men and women, expressed in such fantastic pleasurable style for the readers. The main objective of the student of literature is to discover the best which has been thought in the world. The aim of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written but according to Cardinal Newman , the function of literature is to educate the individuals, to broaden and refine vision, to correct follies and foibles of ordinary men, to improve comprehensible powers, to enhance knowledge and wisdom of the readers. The main object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibilities, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.

To quote Emerson : “Literature is a record of the best thoughts.” Literature is the embodiment of written thoughts and feelings of intellectual men and women, expressed in such fantastic pleasurable style for the readers. The main objective of the student of literature is to discover the best which has been thought in the world. The aim of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written but according to Cardinal Newman , the function of literature is to educate the individuals, to broaden and refine vision, to correct follies and foibles of ordinary men, to improve comprehensible powers, to enhance knowledge and wisdom of the readers. The main object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibilities, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression

These are the objects of that intellectual perfection which a literary education is destined to give. The earnest student of literature is like a sailor who sails into new seas of thought. He tries to understand the human heart, its shifting virtues and vices, its sorrows and joys. The value of poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, novelists lies only in the revelation that they make of the human heart. It is in this sense that literature is called one of the humanities, a training of moral sensibilities and imagination.