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    Difference Between 20th and 21st Century Literature

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    Jules Gajes
    This document summarizes key differences between 20th and 21st century literature. It notes that 20th century literature generally dealt with broad themes of love, loss and life from a general perspective, while 21st century literature explores more intense and specific real-life topics. In terms of structure, 20th century literature followed a traditional beginning-middle-end plot structure whereas 21st century literature is more fragmented. Stylistically, 20th century literature was more traditional while 21st century literature is more experimental with informal styles. In terms of topics, 20th century literature focused more on man versus foreigners, while 21st century literature examines man versus himself.

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    Difference Between 20th and 21st Century Literature

    Uploaded by

    Jules Gajes
    7K views23 pages
    This document summarizes key differences between 20th and 21st century literature. It notes that 20th century literature generally dealt with broad themes of love, loss and life from a general perspective, while 21st century literature explores more intense and specific real-life topics. In terms of structure, 20th century literature followed a traditional beginning-middle-end plot structure whereas 21st century literature is more fragmented. Stylistically, 20th century literature was more traditional while 21st century literature is more experimental with informal styles. In terms of topics, 20th century literature focused more on man versus foreigners, while 21st century literature examines man versus himself.

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    For Senior High School 21st Century Literature of the Philippines and of the World

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    This document summarizes key differences between 20th and 21st century literature. It notes that 20th century literature generally dealt with broad themes of love, loss and life from a general perspective, while 21st century literature explores more intense and specific real-life topics. In terms of structure, 20th century literature followed a traditional beginning-middle-end plot structure whereas 21st century literature is more fragmented. Stylistically, 20th century literature was more traditional while 21st century literature is more experimental with informal styles. In terms of topics, 20th century literature focused more on man versus foreigners, while 21st century literature examines man versus himself.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    7K views23 pages

    Difference Between 20th and 21st Century Literature

    Uploaded by

    Jules Gajes
    This document summarizes key differences between 20th and 21st century literature. It notes that 20th century literature generally dealt with broad themes of love, loss and life from a general perspective, while 21st century literature explores more intense and specific real-life topics. In terms of structure, 20th century literature followed a traditional beginning-middle-end plot structure whereas 21st century literature is more fragmented. Stylistically, 20th century literature was more traditional while 21st century literature is more experimental with informal styles. In terms of topics, 20th century literature focused more on man versus foreigners, while 21st century literature examines man versus himself.

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    of 23

    DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

    TH
    ST
    20 AND 21 CENTURY
    LITERATURE
    Ma. Julie Anne C. Gajes
    BONFAL NATIONAL HIGH
    SCHOOL

    What

    makes the 20th and


    21st century literature
    different from one
    another?

    20th century literature deals with LOVE,


    LOSS and LIFE at a general point of
    view while 21st century literature is
    more specific and the topics are more
    intense such as the extremities of real
    life. (e.g. Pasilyo 8)

    THEME

    20th century literature follows the


    traditional plot (beginning-middleend) while 21st century literature is
    more fragmented

    STRUCTURE

    20th century literature is traditional


    in a way that what you see is what
    you get while 21st century
    literature is experimental it
    would usually take on an informal
    form

    STYLE

    Most 20th century literature


    topics deals with man vs.
    foreigner while 21st century
    literature topics deals with man
    vs. himself

    TOPICS

    PATRICIA
    EVANGELISTA

    a Manila-based journalist and


    documentary filmmaker. She
    is a multimedia reporter for
    online news agency Rappler
    and is a writer-at-large for
    Esquire Magazine.

    Evangelista finished high


    school at St. Theresa's
    College, Quezon City. She
    graduated Cum Laude with a
    degree of BA Speech
    Communication University of
    the Philippines Diliman in
    2006. She is an alumna of
    the UP Debate Society
    (UPDEBSOC).

    The

    Baby in the Backpack

    What can you infer from the title?


    Why is the baby in the backpack?

    The backpack sat on the curbside. The surface was flaking, the
    purple print scratched.
    We found it in the afternoon, beside three corpses in body bags. The
    men working along the highway said that the bodies had just been
    recovered. They said there was a baby in the backpack.
    It was cold that day. The air smelled of dead. I remember crouching
    beside the bag and hunting for the zipper, remember thinking I had
    to verify the story, remember feeling uneasy. It was a morbid act,
    like opening a strangers closed coffin. Maybe it was a convenient
    excuse, an odd conservatism in a city where the dead had been
    shoved into plastic garbage bags. I didnt open the bag, ran my
    hands over it instead, tracing the lumps of head and hands and
    folded knees.
    It was 15 days since the storm, and there was a corpse inside the
    backpack.

    Do

    you remember
    Typhoon Yolanda?

    I write this late at night, in Manila, almost three months after typhoon Haiyan. It
    is difficult to write. I meant to write something else, have been trying to write
    something else for a week, an analysis of post-disaster vulnerabilities and
    government mishandling. I did the interviews, read the documents, watched the
    congressional hearings and the resulting glad-handing and politicking that came
    with it: the secretary of the interior smiling, the mayor of the broken city smiling
    back, the men and women in the background smiling along, all of them grinning
    as if they were not witness to weeks of calling each other liars and frauds.

    Instead Im writing about how it was, on the ground, the apocalypse that all of us
    found when we landed on the Tacloban tarmac. I seem to be unable to write
    about anything else. Ive been a columnist for ten years, a reporter for the last
    five. My beat is disaster and human rights and the stories that fall in between
    the dead, the lost, the rebels and the survivors. Nothing Ive seen prepared me
    for what I saw after Haiyan.

    I dont claim to be a veteran. What Ive seen is nothing to what many others have
    seen, and my version of reportage is very often limited to individual human
    experience instead of the larger implications. I fixate on images, sentences,
    narrative arcs, the smoke in the sky, the blood on the doorknob, the bottle of
    White Flower carried by the defendant, the color and pattern of the tiles on the
    floor of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221 instead of the decision
    handed down by the trial court judge. For me, Haiyan was the rainbow blanket
    around the dead boy. It was the father who covered his drowned daughters
    corpse with a tin roof to protect her from the rain. It was the man who walked
    daily to his girlfriends grave, the plastic panda floating in the water, the baby in
    the purple backpack.

    There were many other stories. Government ineptitude. Political infighting. The
    scale of displacement and the terrible conditions forced on the survivors. I admit I
    went looking for the dead, an easy thing in Haiyan country. My reasoning is the
    same as it's always been in a situation where morals are suspended and the
    narrative makes no sense, it is necessary to hold whatever truth is left: that the
    dead shouldn't be dead.

    Maybe there is some ego involved here, the awareness


    that the sights and smells and sounds that will force the
    average person to turn away is something that can be
    handled without flinching, safe under the cloak of public
    interest. It is necessary to pretend those of us who report
    are tougher than everyone else. It is necessary, very
    often, to pretend this is a job, a commitment, a challenge
    met that separates us from the government clerk or the
    lawyer or even the reporters who cover the seemingly
    safer beats. We understand, for example, that it is
    possible to step away, to retreat to some safe mental
    corner while noting down the observation that the body
    in the water is probably female, that what may or may
    not be breasts are still under the faded yellow shirt, in
    spite of the fact the face above the shirt has been
    stripped of skin and flesh.

    It is of course presumptuous for me to use the word we


    instead of I, but I is a pronoun that I have used under
    protest in the last few years. I is personal, it redirects
    the spotlight, it is arrogant and indulgent and emphasizes
    the primacy of personal opinion instead of the real story. I
    dont pretend to speak for all journalists, or even for some
    journalists. Im not certain I even speak for myself, as the
    safe mental corner that I used to have is no longer
    particularly safe. Fourteen million people were affected, at
    least 6,000 died. What I felt and continue to feel is not the
    story I mean to tell, as there are many things more
    deserving of public space than the confusion of a 28-yearold journalist, especially one who demanded for this
    coverage and found out that the magic cape has holes.

    Everyday I asked the questions. Framed the


    interviews. Rolled the video. Held up a hand to
    stop a weeping man midsentence because of the
    roar of the C130 swooping overhead. Nodded, in
    understanding, as if it was possible to understand
    how it feels to watch wife and children drown
    while hanging on to a slab of concrete. I asked
    survivors about the height of the waters and the
    loss of daughters, and although many of them
    were desperate to tell their stories, it was
    impossible not to feel exploitative, that we were,
    or I was, using their grief to add to the grand
    drama that was the aftermath of typhoon Haiyan.

    I dont pretend I made any sort of difference. The stories I


    told were stories people might or might not read or watch
    or share, in the language of the Internet but they were
    only stories, and at the end of the day I knew I was
    leaving, knew that in a week or two weeks I would be in
    Manila at my desk and the weeping father would still be
    there, in the dark, dreaming of his lost babies. I suspect I
    went looking for the worst to validate my being on the
    ground. It would be romantic to say I was bearing witness
    for the victims. The truth was that I went from shock to
    further shock, and I was afraid, always, that I wasnt
    doing anyones story justice. Covering Haiyan was like
    walking into a Salvador Dali painting and discovering the
    paint was still damp.

    I asked for a week longer, after a week I stayed one more,


    and then was allowed one more. I like to think I stayed as
    long as I could, but thats only one way of telling the story.
    The longer I stayed, the less guilty I felt. I admit I didnt
    finish out that last week, because on the 16th day I found
    myself on the coast shooting a womans corpse hanging
    from a tree. It took a long time to see the body. I was
    standing less than five feet across, I could smell it, I was
    told it was there, but her head was pushed back and her
    arms were the color of dead wood and my brain refused to
    acknowledge that what I was staring at used to be a
    person. When the image suddenly made sense in my head,
    I took the photo, then turned to vomit into the bushes.

    There were many more bodies before and after that, mass graves
    with hundreds of tangled dead, but none of them had me heaving
    with my hands on my knees. Maybe it was the fact she hung meters
    away from the shanty of a man who refused to leave for an
    evacuation center because he was waiting for his missing wife to
    come home I want to be here when she comes, he said. His
    name is William Cabuquing, and he was one of the survivors who
    packed the bodies of his neighbors into bags 14 days after he
    staggered home bleeding after being swept across the bay. He did
    not know who the woman on the tree was.
    That night I was on the phone with my editor. Are you all right, she
    asked. It was a question that at that point seemed terribly
    important, and I stuttered and mumbled and was largely inarticulate
    until I managed to say, after a series of evasions, that yes, I wanted
    to go home.

    The truth is that there is no going home. It is


    difficult to write about it, and more difficult to
    write about anything else. I am aware there are
    many journalists who can move past stories like
    this, that my job demands I move past it myself. I
    also know there are others like me who have been
    smoking too much and sleeping too long, who
    have come home to wake in the night, unable to
    move on to other stories and other
    responsibilities, aware, one way or another, that
    whatever story comes along, Haiyan is out there,
    and the promises we made are still no more than
    promises.

    I like to think of journalism as an attempt to make the public


    imagine. We cannot protest against what we cannot see, we cannot
    move when we cannot be made to feel. Six thousand is a large
    number, larger than Ketsanas 464, Bophas 1,067 or Washis
    1,453, but it is difficult, as with any statistic, to remember that
    each one of the thousands in each of the storms shouldnt have
    died, could have been saved, deserved, if nothing else, to be
    buried with some attempt at dignity instead of being left to rot in a
    muddy field covered with campaign posters. We are meant to
    understand that, to imagine that, to stand in the shoes of the man
    scrabbling in the muck for his fiance. To forget what happened
    makes us all guilty, makes us accomplices to what brought them
    here, allows the same tragedy to happen again and again, as it has
    happened, again and again.

    I dont know what I intended to say. Maybe that I cant


    forget, or that Im afraid I will. Many of us who were on
    the ground are afraid to say what it was like, because
    were supposed to be tough as nails. Were supposed to
    be brave. Were meant to serve the story. Were
    supposed to walk away from the mass grave and report
    the number and the state of decomposition. We can
    stand in the hellhole that was Zamboanga City in
    September and say yes, we can take more. Were afraid
    if we say we cant, we wont be sent to the next story,
    will be told we dont have the balls, dont have what it
    takes, cant deliver, wont survive. I say we because
    its harder to say I, and maybe that was what I meant
    to say.

    How do you find the essay? Can you imagine being


    in Haiyan country yourself? What can you say
    about the experiences the author has written down
    in the essay? How do these make you feel?
    What is one personal story that you have that can
    help you relate more to the essay on hand? How is
    the deadly Typhoon Haiyan portrayed in the text?
    Is this essay entertaining resisting or challenging
    the events or beliefs of the Filipino culture? What
    does it say about journalism and writing?

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