21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

Direction: Read and analyze each statement. Choose the letter of your answer and write it before each number.

A 1. What is an example of literary work?

A. Fiction B. Singing C. Dancing D. Laughing
D 2. It is a computer information that can be represented through audio, video, and animation in addition to
traditional media.
A. Internet B. Google C. You Tube D. Multimedia
D 3. Recorded story is an example of _____?
A. Literature B. Presentation C. Literary work D. Multimedia Presentation
B 4. Dekada 70 is a literary work written by ____?
A. Eros Atalia B. Lualhati Bautista C. Manix Abrera D. Ricky Lee
D 5. One of the literary piece that is written by Jason Paul Laxamana is ____.
A. Ilustrado B. Para Kay B C. ABNKKBSNPLAKO D. 100 Tula Para Kay Stella
C 6. The place of origin of Dekada 70 is ____?
A. Africa B. America C. Philippines D. Australia
D 7. What is the importance of creative representation?
A. It makes us bored.
B. It will make us angry.
C. It will make us lonely.
D. It will make us interested in the story.
A 8. What are the basic components of multimedia presentations of text from 21 st Century Literature?
A. Interaction and dynamism
B. Learning and understanding
C. Innovation and creativity
D. Writing and reading

9-13. In your own words what can you understand about literary work?
Ever since I was small, stories have been a part of my life. Reading books like Old MacDonald Had a Farm
and The Very Hungry Caterpillar before bed became a part of my natural order where I could escape into
another world. To say the least, not much has changed and on most nights, I love to read - to find that escape
away from reality. But, literature is more than that.
Literature is the imaginative work that pictures the human life in society. The author will write the result of
this imagination in a form of literary works. Literary work is a written piece of art, and a work that is formed by a
creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction. Literature acts as a form of
expression for each individual author. Some literary works mirror society and allow us to better understand the
world we live in. We are easily connected to the mind of authors through their stories. Literature is a reflection
of humanity and a means of understanding one another. By listening to another person's voice, we can get a
sense of how that person thinks. Literature, I believe, is crucial because of its purpose, and in a world that is
becoming increasingly disconnected from human interaction, literary works create a conversation.

14-18. Using a chart write 5 21st Century writers on the first column and their literary works on the second
column.
21st Century Writer/s Literary Work/s
Bob Ong ABNKKBSNPLAko?!
Park Min-gyu Pavane for a Dead Princess
Miguel Syjuco Ilustrado
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall
Lualhati Bautista Dekada 70

19-21. Think of your most favorite 21st Century literary text and write your literary analysis about it.
LITERARY ANALYSIS: ‘NIGHTFALL’ BY ISAAC ASIMOV
You may imagine the earth shifting beneath your feet as you stumble out from beneath the 45-tonne bronze cone of London's
planetarium, shaky after a virtual adventure across the solar system and beyond. The National Maritime Museum, the curve of the river,
Canary Wharf, and the rest of the city stretch out beneath you as you stand on the brow of the hill in Greenwich Park, your head still full of
planets spinning on their computer-generated orbits, and the vista seems to roll inexorably east towards the curtain of night. Darkness is an
inescapable fact of life on earth, an astronomical certainty which, for all the terror it brings in childhood, gives our daily existence its rise
and fall, its ebb and flow, as night follows day follows night.

But what if it wasn't the case? What if night wasn't only dense and all-encompassing, but also unexpected and sudden? What if
daylight were so pervasive, so constant, that total darkness was unimaginable, inconceivable? What if there were no one to teach us how
not to be afraid of the dark?

In his 1941 short story "Nightfall", Isaac Asimov takes us to Lagash, a planet deep in a globular cluster surrounded by not one, not
two, not three – but six nearby stars. When Alpha sets, Beta is at zenith; when Gamma is at aphelion, Delta is nearby. The whole planet is
bathed in perpetual sunlight from its constant companions, so that the inhabitants of Saro City have never seen the stars, have never
known the total darkness of night. Until now.

"Nightfall" presents an alternate society for its own sake. It is obviously not an attempt to show what life will be like a few years from
now, so it is not tomorrow fiction. And though it contains a few satirical touches directed at commonly held contemporary assumptions—for
example, Beenay's notion that life as we know it could not exist on a planet revolving about a single sun—still it does not attempt to make
us feel in our guts that air pollution is evil or that violent hoodlums have a right to their own identities. "Nightfall" is not a work of social
fiction.

The characters in "Nightfall" have no visible resemblance to us. They don't exist on Earth's past or future, and they aren't the
remnants from a destroyed human colony. At the same time, we are given no reason to imagine them as anything other than ourselves in
our imaginations. They have brows and arms. Or, at the very least, Asimov employs the terminology developed to describe humans to
describe his aliens. Perhaps this is Asimov's application of Milton's "doctrine of accommodation," in which Milton characterizes his angels
—fallen and unfallen—as being shaped like us and collecting sense data like us, even though they are not and do not. The angels are
simply accommodated to human concepts by Milton. Although Asimov's aliens may be truly strange, he has adapted them to our
understanding of ourselves so that he can discuss them.

Fundamentally, though, it doesn't make any difference. "Nightfall" is about the relationship between consciousness and its
environment. The physical apparatus in which that consciousness is embodied is irrelevant. Human-shaped or alien-shaped, the
consciousnesses on Lagash are what they are because they developed under six suns and a nightfall that comes once every 2,049 years.
Their mentality differs due to the fact that they live in various environments.

"Nightfall" makes such a strong impact because it persuades us that we would behave differently in those circumstances. "Nightfall"
symbolizes a cosmic concept: who we are and how we think are determined by the environment into which we are born by chance. It
creates an alternate planet and society for the sake of it. But that world isn't completely disconnected from our own. It also has lessons for
us to learn. Consciousness, regardless of the environment that shapes it, is sacred.

‘Nightfall" holds up extraordinarily well today, comparing the conflicts between intellectualism and superstition as civilization fails to
learn from its history. Indeed, the final line of the science fiction short story never fails to elicit a chill: “The long night had come again.”

References:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)
https://archive.org/stream/Astounding_v28n01_1941-09_SLiV#page/n8/mode/2up

22-23. Is it really necessary to create multimedia skills in a representation of a literary text?

Yes, it is necessary to create multimedia skills in a representation of a literary text since it makes studying
literature more exciting and meaningful because it provides opportunities for us to construct and reconstruct
ideas in audio and visual formats. Through multimedia platforms, we can apply a wide range of strategies to
understand, interpret, and evaluate texts. There is a huge impact of the use of multimedia in studying literature.
Some multimedia formats that we can use are blog, mind mapping, mobile phone text tula, slideshow
presentation, tag cloud, and video. We can use them creatively to interpret various genres of literary texts.
Studying literature is more exciting with multimedia supports where you can actively and collaboratively build
knowledge structures using technology.

24-25. If you are going to create a multimedia presentation, what literary work will you choose and why?
The Necklace, written by Guy de Maupassant in 1884, is a poignant tale about Mathilde Loisel who is a
beautiful young woman married to an unimportant clerk. She dreams of the finer things of life and is not content
with her secure, middle-class lifestyle. She is embarrassed by her lack of wealth.
One day, she and her husband were invited to a ball. She thought she had nothing proper to wear so she
manages to get some money from her kind husband to buy a new dress. Then, she borrowed a beautiful
diamond necklace from a rich friend. She then lost the necklace and had to work hard many years to pay for the
loss. The price she pays for a single evening of elegance turns into years of labor and despair.
This story is an impressive piece because it gives message and moral for everyone. The moral of the story is
to be happy with what you have in life. Life isn’t about social status or how rich you are. Be thankful and
appreciate what you have.
This is a story that has stood the test of time and is as relevant today as when Maupassant wrote it in the
late nineteenth century. Guy de Maupassant is a fantastic author. In just a few short pages he manages to
convey so many emotions regarding longing, envy, dissatisfaction, vanity, pride, boastfulness, suffering and pain.
The story is brief, yet so full. This is the reason why I choose The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant if I were going
to create a multimedia presentation.