Humanities014-A14

Honestly, when I was encoding,my first thought about it is that if only I have a choice I would not include humanities014 in my course list, -- e kasi naman sa course title palang, alam mo nang puro pagbabasa ang gagawin dito (napaghahalataang tamad magbasa e. haha :p ) . At yun n nga, ( tag-lish talaga .haha) Actually my real section is A12 but luckily our former section was abolished because we are really few. hmm. luckily because on my new section kahit na wala talaga kong kakilala nung unang klase ko sa kanila, pero aun friendly nama sila ( hindi nangangain.haha) ,ansaya nila maging classmates, sila ung mga tipong bumabanat kahit sa gitna ng mga lectures namin, kaya nagiging masaya ang aming discussions :) .

And from the way that I expected, we read lots of literary works such as short stories, poems, novels and essays. and another thing we analyzed it all. My favorite literary work that we have discussed is Carlos Bulosan's " My Father Goes to Court " . I like it because first of all it is short ( haha, just kidding c: ) it's really easy to understand ,the story is very nice && I like the way the story goes and resolved.

My favorite activity is our role play. My group mates are fun to be with, they are very funny and they are really good in stage acting, I really admire them for that because role playing is one of the things that I really can't do well. Our group received an award. For me, my group mates really deserved it,because of their hard works for our play especially our leader Meg. :)

I am very thankful to have a section like A14, I met new friends, I really enjoyed our classes ( but not the exams/ quizzes days c: ) , and for our professor, ma'am Eduarte, thank you for the making me realize that reading is not that boring. thank you for your understanding everytime I am late (hehe). thank you for the memorable experiences.


keep it up guys, good luck next term :)

tanaga :)

img link : http://www.copleysociety.org/.library/_th_Tousignant_SingleTree_web.U483db0c245bf6.png

Every free time we go there,
A field with a huge old tree,
Different faces, different peer,
There we enjoy life spree.


:)

SERVANT GIRL by Estrella Alfon



For me, this is a story that can touch the feelings and emotions of the readers because the situation in the story can possibly be happened in real life situation.

It is like relating ourselves to the life of a servant who works really really hard for their masters. It is quite romantic but the story can make you feel sad either . Like in other stories, there is a guy for the girl (protagonist of the story) who will first be like a savior for her, but in the end the girl will realize that he was not :( . We can get lots of moral lessons in the story like we should treat everyone else equally even though our status in the society is not equal, we should respect them as they are.

FRANCISCO SIONIL JOSE


José was born in Rosales, Pangasinan, the setting of many of his stories. He spent his childhood in Barrio Cabugawan, Rosales, where he first began to write. Jose was of Ilocano descent whose family had migrated to Pangasinan before his birth. Fleeing poverty, his forefathers traveled from Ilocos towards Cagayan Valley through the Santa Fe Trail. Like many migrant families, they brought their lifetime possessions with them, including uprooted molave posts of their old houses and their alsong, a stone mortar for pounding rice.

One of the greatest influences to José was his industrious mother who went out of her way to get him the books he loved to read, while making sure her family did not go hungry despite of poverty and landlessness. José started writing in grade school, at the time he started reading. In the fifth grade, one of José’s teachers opened the school library to her students, which is how José managed to read the novels of José Rizal, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Faulkner and Steinbeck. Reading about Basilio and Crispin in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere made the young José cry, because injustice was not an alien thing to him. When José was five years old, his grandfather who was a soldier during the Philippine revolution, had once tearfully showed him the land their family had once tilled but was taken away by rich mestizo landlords who knew how to work the system against illiterates like his grandfather.


José attended the University of Santo Tomas after World War II, but dropped out and plunged into writing and journalism in Manila. In subsequent years, he edited various literary and journalistic publications, started a publishing house, and founded the Philippine branch of PEN, an international organization for writers. José received numerous awards for his work. The Pretenders is his most popular novel, which is the story of one man's alienation from his poor background and the decadence of his wife's wealthy family.

Throughout his career, José's writings espouse social justice and change to better the lives of average Filipino families. He is one of the most critically acclaimed Filipino authors internationally, although much underrated in his own country because of his authentic Filipino English and his anti-elite views.

"Authors like myself choose the city as a setting for their fiction because the city itself illustrates the progress or the sophistication that a particular country has achieved. Or, on the other hand, it might also reflect the kind of decay, both social and perhaps moral, that has come upon a particular people."-F. Sionil José, BBC.com, July 30, 2003

CARLOS SAMPAYAN BULOSAN

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (born to Ilocano parents in Binalonan, Pangasinan, Luzon, Philippines, November 24, 1913 died in Seattle, Washington on September 13, 1956) was a Filipino American novelist and poet best-known for the semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart.

Carlos Bulosan was born in The Philippines in a rural village of Mangusmana, in the town of Binalonan, Pangasinan. There is considerable debate around his actual birthdate, as he himself used several dates, but 1911 is generally considered the most reliable answer, based on his baptismal records, but according to the late Lorenzo Duyanen Sampayan, his childhood playmate and nephew, Carlos was born on November 2, 1913. Most of his youth was spent in the country side as a farmer. It is during his youth that he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would become one of the main themes of his writing. His home town is also the starting point of his famous semi-autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart.

Like many Filipinos during the time, he left for America on July 22, 1930 at age 17, in the hope of finding salvation from the economic depression of his home. He never again saw his Philippine homeland. No sooner had he arrived in Seattle, was he immediately met with the hostility of racism, forcing him to work in low paying jobs. He worked as a farmworker, harvesting grapes, asparagus and other kinds of hard labor work in the fields of California. He also worked as a dishwasher with his brother and Lorenzo in the famous Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. He was active in labor politics along the Pacific coast of the United States and edited the 1952 Yearbook for ILWU Local 37, a predominantly Filipino American cannery union based in Seattle.

After many years of discrimination, starvation and sickness, Bulosan had to undergo surgery for tuberculosis in the Los Angeles County Sanitarium, now the USC Medical Center. The tuberculosis operations made him lose most of the right side of his ribs and the function of one lung. He was confined in the hospital for two years where he took advantage and read one book per day for 365 days a year. He became a prolific writer and protective voice concerning the struggles Filipinos were forced to live in.

There is some controversy surrounding the accuracy of events recorded within America Is in the Heart. He is celebrated for giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor movement in America and for telling the experience of Filipinos working in the U.S. during the 1930s and '40s. In the 1970s, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Islander American activism, his unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to posthumous releases of several unfinished works and anthologies of his poetry.

His other novels include The Laughter of My Father, which were originally published as short sketches, and the posthumously published The Cry and the Dedication which detailed the armed Huk Rebellion in the Philippines. One of his most famous essays was "Freedom from Want," commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of a series on the "Four Freedoms" and published on March 26, 1943 in the Saturday Evening Post.

As a progressive writer of labor struggles, he was blacklisted by the FBI due to his labor organizing and socialist writings. Denied a means to provide for himself, his later years were of hardship and flight. He died in Seattle suffering from an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia. He is buried at Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.

"The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living ... "

"We in America understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find happiness. It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be illiterate or hungry or miserable."

- from America Is in the Heart

info credits to : www.wikipedia.com

Literature as a Compass

When we are lost in our way and do not know where to go,we traditionally use a compass to find our way back. Just like when we are lost in life and do not know which way to take,literature gives us inspirations in life and leads us on our way back or even in better ways for a better us. :)



a picture from: http://www.faqs.org/photo-dict/photofiles/list/387/754compass.jpg