Kritika Kultura Links

Kritika Kultura, a refereed electronic journal of literary / cultural and language studies launched its first literary issue, the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English. There has been a soft launch last February, and the discussion has been recorded in mp3 format by Adam David.

About the Issue

The Philippine literary community has a relatively longstanding tradition of releasing anthologies focusing on young writers. However, it can be gleaned that the notion of the “new” remains unarticulated, as recent anthologies simply focus on the “young,” and what becomes apparent is the persistent maintenance of an aesthetics solidified in various creative writing institutions and workshops, a notion that is rapidly rendered inaccurate by a healthy production of writing that these anthologies do not include.

What this issue of Kritika Kultura intends to accomplish is to represent the kind of writing that is rarely published, the kind that is not often legitimized by mainstream publications. The kind of writing that we, as editors, can confidently call “new.”

New, in this case, as the word that most succinctly describes literary texts that are mindful of—by way of formal response/appropriation and/or thematic confrontation—several cultural phenomena such as the preponderance of piracy, the simultaneous/schizophrenic sociopolitical conditions of the nation, the “new” government that includes so many of the old names, the highly provisional stances in criticism pertaining to society and art, the currency and increasing value of topicality and ephemera (as evidenced by BPOs, SEOs, and Facebook), the persistent dominance of celebrity culture, and the gossip paradigm of discourse. The anthology welcomes contributions that transgress genre boundaries, revise traditional modes and forms, formally engage with the largely oral, nontextual/extratextual literary practices of the Filipino audience, and display a technical alertness to the quandaries presented by blog-driven writing, Facebook fiction, protest poetry, the malleability of languages, the hegemony of academic publishing in “legitimate” literature, the dominion of western literary models, and, in light of these, the strategic and arguably fictionalizing construction of Filipino identity.

Here's the Introduction by the issue editors Mark Cayanan, Conchitina Cruz and Adam David. Here are the Exquisite Corpses ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ) of the QBCCC peeps Josel Nicolas, DJ Legaspi and Mervin Malonzo. Here is the piece of IYAS co-fellow Alyza Taguilaso. Here are entries from UPLB--Kat Elauria's and Sir Christian Tablazon's. Here's the link to the 320-page issue itself.

And here are my contributions: Entry Taken from the Encyclopaedia of Biomechanical Convertebrates and io (text) (image). The former, as implied by the title, is a wikipedia-ish article about an organism called the Doom Maggot--special thanks have been mentioned at the end of the article. The latter is a visual poem, with stanzas that snowball using the Fibonacci sequence--this piece was performed by KarMa Kolektib during TALENTADOS, the event of UP PhotoS last February.

Salamat. Salamat din sa mga nauna nang nagshare at nagbasa.