The document provides biographical information on two prominent Filipino post-war writers, Virginia Moreno and Estrella D. Alfon. It discusses their backgrounds, influences, and contributions to Philippine literature. Moreno was a feminist poet whose work explored both aesthetics and politics. Alfon was a prolific writer from Cebu who wrote extensively in English, despite it not being her first language. She was one of the only female members of the avant-garde literary group The Veronicans and drew from her own life experiences in her stories. Both writers helped revive and advance Philippine literature in the post-war period.

2. The Philippines: 19601975
 The Culture Center of
the Philippines and the
Implications of the PCN
 During the Marcos
regime, Imelda had a
vision to make the
Philippines a center of
fashion, art, and culture.
She implemented this
vision through various
million-dollar infrastructure
projects. Such projects
included the Cultural
Center of the
Philippines, which was
meant to promote and
preserve Filipino art.

3. 
It was established in
1966 and was
designed by Leandro
Locsin, a Filipino
architect (who
appreciated the use of
concrete, as you can
tell by the facade of the
main building.) On its
opening day in
1969, there was a
three-month
celebration with a
musical and other
series of events. It was
that big of a deal that
even Mr. and Mrs.
Ronald Reagan were in
attendance!

4. Kabataang Makabayan

Kabataang Makabayan is a social
activism organization founded on
November 30, 1964 by Filipino
revolutionary Jose Maria Sison.
Kabataan Makabayan (KM)
translates to “Pro People Youth,”
and is centered in the power of
society‟s youth to change the status
quo of injustice in their political
system.

KM is made up of students, young
workers, peasants and
professionals.
In the late 1950s, study circles
under the Student Cultural
Association of the University of the
Philippines (SCAUP) on the
Philippine-Revolution and MarxismLeninism would later form the
student membership of KM.

5. 
In the early 1950s, KM was
born out of reactions to the
fall of the Old People‟s
army and the Armed
Revolutionary movement of
the people. Sison declared
in his speech that LM
“arose from the concrete
conditions of sharpening
oppression and exploitation
of the Filipino youth and
people from the early
1960s onwards.”

Kabataang Makabayan
protestors during martial
law chanting, “Ibagsak!
Ibaksak ang mga tuta!”
They are notorious to conservatives
and the Philippine government
for mobilizing youth in mass
protest actions, including during
the Anti-Martial Law movement
against the dictatorship of
Ferdinand Marcos.
 KM protested and continues to
organize against unjust
Philippine treaties with the US in
the economic and military
fields, against US wars of
aggression, “against the killing
of Filipinos in US military
bases, against the puppetry of
the reactionary regime, against
the big compradors and
landlords, against oppressive
and exploitative school
authorities” (Sison)

6. 
the influence of KM in my
hometown- known as “Pro
People Youth” and “KmB”
here, their chapter in Los
Angeles and is constantly
educating Filipino-American
youth, encouraging
consciousness and community
activism. They have organized
for Justice for Filipino
American
Veterans, collaborated with
other Fil-Am organizations to
send supplies and money to
Typhoon Ondoy victims in the
Philippines, and have rallied
alongside PalestinianAmericans against the Israeli
occupation of Gaza.

KmB flag was at a Gabriela
Network protest in Los
Angeles for the “GabNet 3,”
three GabNet women
prevented from boarding
their flight back home to the
US after allegedly being
blacklisted by President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
(GabNet is active in
speaking against human
rights violations under
GMA‟s administration.) KmB
member John-Eric
Concordia, told that standing
against this kind of injustice
was not only important but
necessary.

7. Movies and Cinema in the
Philippines during the 1960s

In the Philippines during
the 1960s to the early
1970s, so-called “bomba”
pictures largely
summarized Filipino
cinema. These films were
largely based off of
James Bond and other
western-spinoff films.
During this
time, Sampaguita
Pictures (one of the
movie production
companies) came under
siege from the growing
labor movements.

8. 
The decade also saw
the emergence of the
youth revolution
demonstrated by the
Beatles and rock and
role. Thus, certain
movie genres were
made to cater this
“revolt.” Through this
revolution, fan movies
and teen love teamups were created
which included Nora
Aunor, Vilma
Santos, Tirso Cruz
III, and Edgar Mortiz.

Movies genres showing
disapproval for the status quo
during the political era were
also popular. Action movies
with Pinoy cowboys and
secret agents as the movers
of the plots depicted a “society
ravaged by criminality and
corruption.” This was not the
only form of youth
revolution, movies featuring
child stars started to gain
fame. Towards the end of the
decade “bomba films,” also
known as soft porn
movies, became increasingly
popular and were seen as a
direct challenge to the
conventions, norms, and
conduct.

9. 
Color movie
technology, called
Eastmancolor, helped
Filipino filmmakers
create successful fulllength movies. One of
the first color
productions was Ito
ang Pilipino. After the
release of Ito ang
Pilipino, movie
producers completely
stopped producing
movies in black and
white.

Under martial law set in 1972
by order of President
Ferdinand Marcos, many films
in popular cinema were used
as political propaganda
against the government. In
spite of this portrayal of the
government, Marco‟s and his
staff created the Board of
Censors for Motion
Pictures, which regulated the
content and government
portrayal in movies. Through
this agency, movies were
required to include ideologies
of the New Society such as
discipline, uprightness, and

10. Filipino Sports/The Araneta Coliseum

Sports in the Philipines was highlighted on
March 16, 1960 when the Araneta Coliseum
opened with a wrestling match between the
boxer Gabriel „Flash‟ Elorde and the World
Junior Lightweight crown from American
Harold Gomes. During this opening
ceremony match, more than 33,000
spectators attended. Due to it‟s
popularity, admission prices were favorable
at 80 centavos for a general seat and five
pesos for reserve seating. The mission of the
Araneta Coliseum was to provide the people
of the Philippines with the best entertainment
available at the lowest cost. Many of these
events included concerts, boxing
matches, wresting, and eventually basketball
games. Some of the most remembered
performances were the “Thrilla in Manila”
which was the Ali-Fraizer World Heavyweight
Championship Fight, the Philippine
Basketball Association Games, and
annually, the Bb. Pilipinas Beauty Pageant.

11. 
For the Philippine
Basketball
Association, the Araneta
Coliseum was and is
still considered home.
Commissioned in
1975, the Philippine
Basketball Association
is the oldest country in
Asia to have a
professional basketball
league. Since it‟s
debut, the arena has
been home to more
than 400 games.

The historic “Thrilla in
Manila”, the 15-round
bout between
Muhammad Ali and Joe
Frazier, was held at the
Big Dome on October
1, 1975. This was the
fight that carved out the
legendary reputation of
Muhammad Ali as one of
the greatest boxers of all
time.

12. Timeline of Sigificant Moments in Filipino Sports from
1960 – 1975:







March 16, 1960 – Gabriel “Flash” Elorde became a world
champion in the 130-pound division on when he knocked out
American Harold Gomes at the Araneta Coliseum in
Cubao, Quezon City.
February 6, 1964 – Filipino boxer Anthony Villanueva won the
country‟s first silver medal in the Tokyo Olympics.
March 20, 1964 – Roberto Cruz knocked out Raymundo Torres in
the first round to clinch the vacant World Boxing Association (WBA)
junior welterweight championship in Los Angeles, California.
December 14, 1968 – Pedro Adigue beat American Adolph Pruitt
to bag the World Boxing Council (WBC) junior welterweight title.
February 15, 1969 – Rene Barrientos was declared World Boxing
Council (WBC) super featherweight champion of the world in
Tokyo, Japan
April 25, 1972 – Ben Villaflor dethroned Alfredo Marcano as the
world junior lightweight champion at the age of 18 years old.
October 1, 1975 – The Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City hosted
the infamous “Thrilla in Manila”, the thrilling boxing match between
Heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. -NC

13. A Hectare of Rice

One important part of a
nation‟s economy is
agriculture. At the time of
Marcos‟s regime, the world
was relying on chemicalintensive technologies of
the green revolution.
Growing numbers of
farmers are beginning to
outperform and outgrow
other competitors that are
using chemicals that work
with natural ecological
forces.

The Philippine based research
group, International Rich
Research Institute (IRRI),
created hybrid varieties of rice
yielding record numbers that
responds to all the pesticides,
chemical fertilizers, and
irrigation methods. Some
institutions pitched in
incredible amounts of money
to encourage a more
widespread use of the hybrid
rice. By the 1960s, the first
“miracle rice” was introduced
to the world and by 1973,
Filipino farmers were using the
seeds but found themselves
harvesting a low 1.7 tons per
hectare compared to the IRRI
average levels of production

14. 
The cost of planting eventually covered
the income from the crops his health was
deteriorating. Other farmers that
experienced the same thing Lorenzo did
turned to the Department of Agriculture to
shift to organic farming methods. Having
been shot down, they turned to the CADI
(Center for Alternative Development
Initiatives) promoting ecological
agriculture for help. Ikapati Farms and
Co. was a for-profit affiliate of CADI and
demonstrated the viability of biodynamic
farming. This involves high yielding
seeds and natural pest control with
several methods of preparation and
practice to maintain and enhance the
fertility of the soil and nitrogen levels and
stimulate the process of photosynthesis.
With the help of Ikapati
technology, farmers were able to harvest
6.5 tons per hectare, 3 times the average
of harvest in the area. Most farmers
harvested more than the average of
chemical farmers and made more than 2
and a half times more money of typical
chemical farmers. These farmers
demonstrated the possibility on
immediate shifting from chemical to
biodynamical methods on commercial
sale that increased both yields and
income.

16. PHILIPPINE LITERATURE POST-WAR PERIOD












In the year 1941-1945, Philippine Literature was interrupted in its development
when the Philippines were again conquered by another foreign country, Japan.
Philippine literature in English came to halt.
After the war, it took some time before the writers could find their bearings.
-Writing in English was consigned to limbo.
The reason was that almost writings in English were stopped or strictly
prohibited by the Japanese.
* In other words, Filipino literature was given a break during this period.
* This had an advantages effect on Filipino Literature, w/c experienced
renewed attention because writers in English turned to writing in Filipino.
* After the war, however with a fervor and drive for excellence that continues to
this day.
Until 50th years – literary output still carried the stock theme of war and its
hardship. Bitterness was a common tone.
Later a new group of writers sprung up.
*writing of this new group was characterized by liberalism in thought and
outlook.
They were influenced by new literary theories by a new of symbolism, by
existentialism by the post-war European, new communication modes, by
ideology and practice of communism.
Filipino had by this time, learned to express themselves more confidently but
post-war problems beyond language and print like economic stability, the threat
of new ideas and morality had to be grappled with side by side.

17. Filipino post war writers:
 Virginia
Moreno is a feminist. She is
recognized not only as a poet but as a
Philippine woman artist whose vision of art
includes both aesthetics and politics. She is a
poet whose works are deeply imbricated in
her country‟s socio-political and cultural
milieu. Moreno has, however, managed to
marry form, content and create texts whose
polyvalence of idioms allow readers to
contend with their very own historicity. She is
a poet who has an interest in French
Impressionism and Symbolist poetry while the
rest of her generation, having been immersed
in English and American Literature.

18. 
Estrella D. Alfon (1917) – December
28, 1983) was a well-known Filipina author who
wrote almost exclusively in English. As a
Filipino writer, Estrella Alfon lived her life of
being a prolific writer who hailed from Cebu.
Because of unwavering and poor health, she
could manage only an A. A. degree from the
University of the Philippines. She then became
a member of the U. P. writers club and earned
and was given the privileged post of National
Fellowship in Fiction post at the U. P. Creative
Writing Center. She died in the year 1983 at the
age of 66.

19. 
Personal
 Estrella Alfon was born in Cebu City in 1917. Unlike other
writers of her time, she did not come from the
intelligensia. Her parents were shopkeepers in Cebu.[1]
She attended college, and studied medicine. When she
was mistakenly diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a
sanitarium, she resigned from her pre-medical
education, and left with an Associate of Arts degree.
 Alfon has several children: Alan Rivera, Esmeralda
"Mimi" Rivera, Brian Alfon, Estrella "Twinkie" Alfon, and
Rita "Daday" Alfon (deceased). She has 10
grandchildren.
 Her youngest daughter, was a stewardess for Saudi
Arabian Airlines, and was part of the Flight 163 crew on
August 19, 1980, when an in-flight fire forced the aircraft
to land in Riyadh. A delayed evacuation resulted in the
death of everyone aboard the flight.
 Alfon died on December, 28 1983, following a heart
attack suffered on-stage during Awards night of the
Manila Film Festival

20. 
Professional
 She was a storywriter, playwright, and journalist. In
spite of being a proud Cebuana, she wrote almost
exclusively in English. She published her first
story, “Grey Confetti”, in the Graphic in 1935. [2]
 She was the only female member of the
Veronicans, an avant garde group of writers in the
1930s led by Francisco Arcellana and H.R.
Ocampo, she was also regarded as their muse. The
Veronicans are recognized as the first group of
Filipino writers to write almost exclusively in English
and were formed prior to the World War II. She is
also reportedly the most prolific Filipina writer prior to
World War II. She was a regular contributor to
Manila-based national magazines, she had several
stories cited in Jose Garcia Villa‟s annual honor rolls.

21. “Alfon was one writer who unashamedly drew from her own real-life
experiences. In some stories, the first-person narrator is “Estrella” or
“Esther.” She is not just a writer, but one who consciously refers to her act
of writing the stories. In other stories, Alfon is still easily identifiable in her
first-person reminiscences of the past: evacuation during the Japanese
occupation; estrangement from a husband; life after the war. In the
Espeleta stories, Alfon uses the editorial “we” to indicate that as a member
of that community, she shares their feelings and responses towards the
incidents in the story. But she sometimes slips back to being a first-person
narrator. The impression is that although she shares the sentiments of her
neighbors, she is still a distinct personality who detaches her self from the
scene in order to understand it better. This device of separating herself as
narrator from the other characters is contained within the larger strategy of
distantiation that of the writer from her strongly autobiographical material. Thelma E. Arambulo”
 In the 1950s, her short story, "Fairy Tale for the City", was condemned by
the Catholic League of the Philippines as being "obscene". She was even
brought to court on these charges. While many of her fellow writers did
stand by her, many did not. These events hurt her deeply.
 In spite of having only an A.A. degree, she was eventually appointed as a
professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines, Manila.
She was a member of the U.P. Writers Club, she held the National
Fellowship in Fiction post at the U.P. Creative Writing Center in 1979.
 She would also serve on the Philippine Board of Tourism in the 1970s.


22. 





Achievements
1940: A collection of her early short stories, “Dear
Esmeralda,” won Honorable Mention in the
Commonwealth Literary Award.
1961-1962: Four of her one-act plays won all the
prizes in the Arena Theater Play Writing Contest:
“Losers Keepers” (first prize), “Strangers” (second
prize), “Rice” (third prize), and “Beggar” (fourth
prize).
1961-1962: Won top prize in the Palanca Contest
for “With Patches of Many Hues.”
1974: Second place Palanca Award for her short
story, "The White Dress".[7]
1979: National Fellowship in Fiction post at the
U.P. Creative Writing CPalanca Award

23. 
Estrella Alfon has won the Palanca Awards a
number of times
 Forever Witches, One-act Play (Third place, 1960)
 With Patches of Many Hues, One-act Play (First
place, 1962)
 Tubig, One-act Play (Second place, 1963)
 The Knitting Straw, One-act Play, (Third place, 1968)
 The White Dress, Short Story (Second place, 1974)

24. 
Stories
 Magnificence and Other Stories (1960)
 Stories of Estrella Alfon (1994) (published
posthumously)
 Servant Girt (short story)

25. 
Influence
 Estrella Alfon writes about everyday life, but she
captures the details in this dazzling, intense light.
She could write about the ordinary and make it
extraordinary. She could write about a day on the
farm or a picnic with friends or a poor laundry woman
wishing that her life were different because she was
being abused by her mistress. They were very
simple stories about ordinary people, whose lives we
don't know until she uncovers them in the stories. I
was just hooked. Whatever designs my mother may
have had, they worked.

27. Philippine Literature in the PostWar and Contemporary Period

Published in 1946, Ginto Sa Makiling - a novel
by Macario Pineda, is the first work of note that
appeared after the second world war. In plot, it
hews close to the mode of romantic fantasy
traceable to the awits, koridos and komedyas of
the Balagtas tradition. But it is a symbolical
narrative of social, moral and political import. In
this, it resembles not only Balagtas but also
Rizal, but in style and plot it is closer to
Balagtas in not allowing the realistic mode to
restrict the element of fantasy.

28. 
Two novels by writers in English dealt with the war
experience: (Medina, p. 194) Stevan Javellana‟s Without
Seeing the Dawn (1947), and Edilberto Tiempo‟s Watch in the
Night. Both novels hew closely to the realist tradition. Lazaro
Francisco, the eminent Tagalog novelist of the pre-war
years, was to continue to produce significant work. He revised
his Bayaning Nagpatiwakal (1932), refashioning its plot and in
sum honing his work as a weapon against the policies that
tended to perpetuate American economic dominance over the
Philippines. The updated novel was titled Ilaw Sa Hilaga (1948)
(Lumbera, p. 67). He was to produce three more novels.Sugat
Sa Alaala (1950) reflects the horrors of the war experience as
well as the human capacity for nobility, endurance and love
under the most extreme circumstances. Maganda Pa Ang
Daigdig (1956) deals with the agrarian
issue, and Daluyong (1962) deals with the corruption bred by
the American-style and American-educated pseudo-reformers.
Lazaro Francisco is a realist with social and moral ideals. The
Rizal influence on his work is profound.

29. 
The poet Amado Hernandez, who was also
union leader and social activist, also wrote novels
advocating social change. Luha ng Buwaya (1963)
(Lumbera) deals with the struggle between the
oppressed peasantry and the class of politically
powerful landlords. Mga Ibong Mandaragit (1969)
deals with the domination of Filipinos by American
industry (Lumbera, p. 69).

Unfortunately, the Rizalian path taken by
Lazaro Francisco and Amado Hernandez with its
social-realist world-view had the effect of alienating
them from the mode of the highly magical oral-epic
tradition. Imported social realism (and, in the case
of Amado Hernandez, a brand of socialist
empiricism), was not entirely in touch with the folk
sentiment and folk belief, which is why the Tagalog
romances (e.g., Ginto Sa Makiling, serialized in
the comics), were far more popular than their work.

30. 
It was Philippine Literature in English which
tapped the folk element in the Philippine
unconscious to impressive, spectacular effect. Nick
Joaquin, through his neo-romantic, poetic and
histrionic style, is reminiscent of the dramas of
Balagtas and de la Cruz. His dizzying flashbacks
(from an idealized romantic Spanish past to a
squalid Americanized materialistic present) are
cinematic in effect, ironically quite Hollywoodish, serving always to beguile and astonish.

Francisco Arcellana, his younger
contemporary, was a master of minimalist fiction
that is as native as anything that could be written in
English, possessing the potent luminosity of a
sorcerer‟s rune.

31. 
Wilfrido Nolledo, fictionist-playwright growing up in
the aura of such masters, was the disciple who, without
conscious effort, created a school of his own. His
experiments in plot and plotlessness, his creation of
magical scenes, made splendorous by a highly
expressive language, easily became the rage among
young writers who quickly joined (each in his/her own
highly original style) the Nolledo trend. Among these
poetic fictionists of the 1960‟s were Wilfredo Pasqua
Sanchez, Erwin Castillo, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Resil
Mojares, Leopoldo Cacnio and Ninotchka Rosca. Of
them all, only the last two did not publish verse. Their
non-realistic (even anti-realistic) style made them
perhaps the most original group of writers to emerge in
the post-war period. But such a movement that
slavishly used the American colonists‟ language
(according to the Nationalist, Socialist Tagalog writers
who were following A.V. Hernandez) were called
decadent (in the manner of Lukacsian social realism).

32. 
Post-war poetry and fiction was dominated
by the writers in English educated and trained
in writers‟ workshops in the United States or
England. Among these were the novelists
Edilberto and Edith Tiempo (who is also a
poet), short-fictionist Francisco Arcellana, poetcritic Ricaredo Demetillo, poet-fictionist Amador
Daguio, poet Carlos Angeles, fictionists N.V.M.
Gonzales and Bienvenido N. Santos. Most of
these writers returned to the Philippines to
teach. With their credentials and solid
reputations, they influenced the form and
direction of the next generation mainly in
accordance with the dominant tenets of the
formalist New Critics of America and England.

33. 
Even literature in the Tagalog-based national
language (now known as Filipino) could not avoid
being influenced or even (in the critical sense)
assimilated. College-bred writers in Filipino like
Rogelio Sikat and Edgardo Reyes saw the need to
hone their artistry according to the dominant school
of literature in America of that period, despite the
fact that the neo-Aristotelian formalist school went
against the grain of their socialist orientation. Poetcritic Virgilio Almario (1944- ), a.k.a. Rio Alma, in a
break-away move reminiscent of Alejandro
Abadilla, and in the formalist (New Critical) mode
then fashionable, bravely opined that Florante at
Laura, Balagtas‟ acknowledged masterpiece, was
an artistic failure (Reyes, p. 71-72). It was only in
the early 1980‟s (Reyes, p. 73) that Almario (after
exposure to the anti-ethnocentrism of structuralism
and Deconstruction) revised his views.

34. 
The protest tradition of Rizal, Bonifacio and Amado Hernandez
found expression in the works of Tagalog poets from the late 1960‟s
to the 1980‟s, as they confronted Martial Law and repression.
Among these liberationist writers were Jose Lacaba, Epifanio San
Juan, Rogelio Mangahas, Lamberto Antonio, Lilia Quindoza, and
later, Jesus Manuel Santiago. The group Galian sa Arte at
Tula nurtured mainly Manila writers and writing (both in their craft
and social vision) during some of the darkest periods of Martial Law.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes on the printed page, oral
literature flourished in the outlying communities. Forms of oral poetry
like the Cebuano Balak, the Ilokano Bukanegan, the
Tagalog Balagtasan, and the SamalTinis-Tinis, continued to be
declaimed by the rural-based bards, albeit to dwindling audiences.
In the late 1960‟s, Ricaredo Demetillo had, using English (and
English metrics) pioneered a linkage with the oral tradition. The
result was the award-winning Barter in Panay, an epic based on the
Ilonggo epic Maragtas. Inspired by the example, other younger
poets wrote epics or long poems, and they were duly acclaimed by
the major award-giving bodies. Among these poets were writers in
English like Cirilo Bautista (The Archipelago, 1968), Artemio Tadena
(Northward into Noon, 1970) and Domingo de Guzman
(Moses, 1977).

35. 
However, except for Demetillo‟s modern epic, these
attempts fall short of establishing a linkage with the
basic folk tradition. Indeed, most are more like long
meditative poems, like Eliot‟s or Neruda‟s long
pieces. Interest in the epic waned as the 1980‟s
approached. The 1980‟s became a decade of
personalistic free verse characteristic of American
confessional poetry. The epic "big picture"
disappeared from the scene, to be replaced by a
new breed of writers nourished by global literary
sources, and critical sources in the developed
world. The literary sources were third world (often
nativistic) poetry such as that of Neruda, Vallejo
and Octavio Paz. In fiction, the magic-realism of
Borges, Garcia Marquez and Salman
Rushdie, among others, influenced the fiction of
Cesar Aquino, Alfred Yuson, and poet-fictionist
Mario Gamalinda.

36. 
On the other hand, the poets trained in American
workshops continue to write in the lyrical-realist
mode characteristic of American writing, spawned
by imagism and neo-Aristotelianism. Among these
writers (whose influence remains considerable) are
the poet-critics Edith L. Tiempo, Gemino
Abad, Ophelia A. Dimalanta and Emmanuel Torres.
Their influence can be felt in the short lyric and the
medium-length meditative poem that are still the
Filipino poet‟s preferred medium. Some
contemporary poets in English such as Marjorie
Evasco and Merlie Alunan, derive their best effects
from their reverence for the ineluctable image.
Ricardo de Ungria‟s and Luisa Aguilar Cariño‟s
poems, on the other hand, are a rich confluence of
imagism, surrealism and confessionalism.

37. 
The Philippine novel, whether written in English or
any of the native languages, has remained socialrealist. Edgardo Reyes‟ Sa Mga Kuko ng
Liwanag (1966), for instance, is a critique of urban
blight, and Edilberto K. Tiempo‟s To Be Free is a
historical probe of the western idea of freedom in
the context of indigenous Philippine culture.
Kerima Polotan Tuvera‟s novel The Hand of the
Enemy (1972), a penetratingly lucid critique of
ruling-class psychology, is entirely realistic, if
Rizalian in its moments of high satire, although
unlike the Rizalian model, it falls short of a moral
vision.

Only a few novelists like Gamalinda, Yuson
and Antonio Enriquez, can claim a measure of
success in tapping creative power from folk
sources in their venture to join the third world
magic-realist mainstream.

38. 
But the poets of oral-folk charisma, such as
Jose Corazon de Jesus, are waiting in the
wings for a comeback as astonishing as Lamang‟s legendary resurrection. Modernist and
post-modernist criticism, which champions the
literature of the disempowered cultures, has
lately attained sufficient clout to shift the focus
of academic pursuits towards native vernacular
literatures (oral and written) and on the
revaluation of texts previously ignored, such as
those by women writers. Sa Ngalan Ng
Ina (1997), by prize-winning poet-critic Lilia
Quindoza Santiago, is, to date, the most
comprehensive compilation of feminist writing
in the Philippines.