House of Memory

The War of Translation: Colonial Education, American English and Tagalog Slang in the Philippines b y Vicente Rafael A Once Written Report Let's say, I have two friends; However, the years that I have known them separately varies in span of years. For example, this Friend Number One, has been my friend for three years already; Whereupon, this Friend Number Two is my "childhood" friend. When we become friends to someone, in a way, we acquire the way they talk, their gestures, mannerism, even the way they look at things in perspective. So, basically, it is more natural to assume that between these two friends I have, I am much closer to Friend Number Two. From a stranger's perspective, they would possibly connect the fact that, since she is my childhood friend, I have a longer history of friendship with her compared to the former. T hat’s, most of the time, how it is: The longer you know the person, the bigger the chance for anyone to jump into conclusion that we are mu

Dead Stars , as what Fernandez revealed on her readings, is not only worth a glimmer of tears but a real sense of discovery. Despite years of not having read it, there still lies a certain degree of combined mystery and fascination— the feeling of being exposed repeatedly at something familiar yet it doesn’t fail to give off the sense of new discovery. That is the charm of the short story “Dead Stars” which sprang from the mind of Paz Marquez-Benitez . We have Alfredo Salazar, the man who, despite the life of luxury he has, is still burdened with this “formless melancholy”. Is it because he impulsively mortgage the hidden possibilities of the future to fill his craving for transient excitement? That the use of force in the hand of Time or of Fate has made him miss the Love? But it is Julia Salas to everyone but Julita only for Alfredo, the woman of his “last spurt of hot blood”. The root of his frequent “neighboring” to the house on the hill that once meant nothing to him. The receivin

Think about this.  Have you ever been in that moment-- constantly, when you feel belittled by this disturbing idea that you are just a mere speck of sheer opportunities in a world that is so gigantic? Perhaps, you have been there when it seems like you are just... too small, so little to be worth consideration. As if you are just something embossed as lightly as possible with nothing but life. The Death of the Moth, a timeless literary composition of Virginia Woolf written in 1942, plunges into the consequential aspects of two opposing and competing forces of existence-- life and death. This is probably Woolf's attempt to somehow give semblance of order to the ever chaotic concomitance of life with death, as both are presently beyond most of our capabilities to understand. Right in the beginning, Woolf has succinctly specified which moths in particular are used as a metaphor of human mortality. " Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths... " The present s

INTRODUCTION The short story, "Dawn Breaking" is the literary text under study. This is included on Macario Pineda's anthology Love in the Rice Field and Other Short Stories which is retold in English by Soledad Reyes. This is an interesting story about a dying soldier whose last moments are spent in reminiscences of his past. The impression that one draws from the close reading of the text is the narrative technique that the author employs to set the thematic interpretation of the story. If we examine this in terms of formalist approach we see the story dramatizes through the formal features of the text-- plot, structure, and narrative which details the situation the soldier finds himself in and his actual condition. Hence, these literary elements in "Dawn Breaking" can provide us a fertile and challenging ground for a formalist analysis. In order to examine Pineda's "Dawn Breaking" from a formalist viewpoint, an overview of Formalism should prov