What have you done?

We at UP Mindanao spent the whole day today (I could only attend the afternoon session, though) cooped up at one of Gran Meng Seng Hotel’s function rooms for the “Consultative Forum on the Roadmap for UP’s Next 100 Years.”

One of the questions posed by the participants from outside the academe was UP’s contribution to the educational development of Mindanao. Apparently, UP Mindanao has not really made a dent in the region’s education sector. And I would tend to agree. We haven’t really done enough — given the financial and manpower constraints we in the University face.

But we do try. Just like when we were given the opportunity, last summer 2008, to share our faculty’s expertise through an “Advanced Study for Enhancement Program in English Proficiency” that we organized, with funding from DepEd Region 11 and the Compostela Valley Provincial Government, for selected high school teachers.

The teacher-participants were game in going through exercises that would train them how to make their classrooms more student-activity centered rather than the usual “banking method” employed by most high school teachers.

The teachers had a great time throughout the three-week training workshop, and they professed to having learned a lot from the UP teachers. (I just hope what they said really translates into them replicating the techniques they learned in the workshop to their classrooms back in ComVal.)

So, yes. UP has done something to help develop the education sector in Mindanao. And I wish we can do more.

Working with words

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I like what Gémino Abad says about why he writes: “I was curious how one could look with words and see things clearly again” (State of Play 14). Implied in his statement is the driving force — call it curiosity or necessity, or call it passion — that propels writers into a world of words.

For as soon as writers, according to Annie Dillard, “lay out a line of words … [the] line of words [becomes] a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. [They] wield it, and it digs a path [they] follow” (qtd. in Burke and Tinsley 16).

Following those lines of words becomes an arduous journey for writers, though. The opening they carve in the jungle of language leads them into an unknown and, more often than not, labyrinthine path that may seem to lead them to forks or crossroads before it brings them somewhere “meaningful.”

To understand how they clear a way through the dense foliage of language, the linguist Roger Fowler contended that “linguistic methods and tools [are] necessary for the proper and detailed analysis of literary texts” (Green and LeBihan 3).

What this kind of analysis achieves is an understanding of how linguistic units construct a text (a line of words, according to Dillard; a stretch of language comprising one or more units of meaning, according to Green and LeBihan) from the level of speech sounds to the syntactic level.

This kind of description grounds any possible interpretation of a text; that is, whatever impressions a reader may get from a text can always be cross-checked against its grammatical construction.

What this formal analysis lacks, however, is a description of the context to which a syntactical unit belongs. This “knowable context” accounts for how a text “is transformed into discourse when it forms a coherent whole.” For example, we understand the following text not only as a sequence of imperative sentences but also as belonging to the discourse of recipe books: “Wash and core the apples. Put them in a bowl” (Green and LeBihan 8).

We are able to understand the sentence quoted above because we recognize the style usually adopted by writers of recipe books. Stylistics, however scholars may agree to define it later on (the verdict is still out), provides us a better grasp of a particular discourse through its identification of linguistic features that may be typical and/or unique in a particular genre.

Which leads us to the next question: Is there such a thing as a language unique to literature? How is this language different from the “ordinary” language we use to communicate in our everyday conversations?

The Russian Formalists, way back in the 1910s-1920s, asked the same questions in their investigations into what made literature literature? Influenced by the philosophical works of Edmund Husserl, they wanted to find out what distinguished literature from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, and other fields of study (Rivkin and Ryan 3).

They focused on the use of “poetic” versus “practical” language in literary texts. One result of their investigation was the realization that, according to Viktor Shklovsky in his The Resurrection of the Word, “‘artistic’ perception is a perception that entails awareness of form” (Eichenbaum, in Rivkin and Ryan 10).

According to Boris Eichenbaum, “art is expressed in a special usage of material, the principles of the palpableness of form had to be made concrete enough to foster the analysis of form itself — form understood as content. It had to be shown that the palpableness of form results from special artistic procedures acting on perceivers so as to force them to experience form” (in Rivkin and Ryan 10-11).

(To be continued)

Works cited:

Abad, Gémino H. State of Play: Letter-Essays and Parables. Manila: Kalikasan Press,

Burke, Carol and Molly Best Tinsley. The Creative Process. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Green, Keith and Jill LeBihan. Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook. London: Routledge, 1996.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan (eds.). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998.

Labeled

When you are on the receiving end of other people’s judgments, how do you deal with the negative interpretations of your actions and your character? How do you accept, with equanimity, other people’s judgments?

Do you say, “That’s all right. Everybody’s entitled to their opinions”? And then lash out at them first chance you get?

Typical illustration in a 19th century book about Physiognomy (on the left: “Utter despair”, and on the right: “Rage mixed with fear”), reproduction by Tom Ordelman, posted on Wikimedia.

Limited by words

I’m taking my time today. Taking things slowly even if there are a lot of tasks that has to be done. This step is necessary for my well-being. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday’s heated argument with a colleague.

So today over a mug of coffee, I’m reading my copy of the Daodejing again, beginning with Passage 1 again. In Hodge’s book, the copy I have, this passage is classified under “Language and Guidance.” I read the passage and Hodge’s commentary. The last part of the commentary caught my attention: