2 CNF-PresentACritique-Memoir
2 CNF-PresentACritique-Memoir
2 CNF-PresentACritique-Memoir
Republic Act 8293, section 176 states that: “No copyright shall subsist in
any work of the Government of the Philippines. However, prior approval of the
government agency or office wherein the work is created shall be necessary for the
exploitation of such work for a profit. Such agency or office may, among other things,
impose as a condition the payment of royalties.”
Borrowed materials (i.e., songs, stories, poems, pictures, photos, brand
names, trademarks, etc.) included in this module are owned by their respective
copyright holders. Every effort has been exerted to locate and seek permission to
use these materials from their respective copyright owners. The publisher and
authors do not represent nor claim ownership over them.
IN A NUTSHELL
Good writing is essential and should be the desire of every ” student specifically the students taking Creative Nonfiction. Creative
TARGETS UNLOCKED
At the end of this module, you should be able
to
1. Present a commentary/critique on a chosen creative nonfictional text
representing a particular type or form (Biography/Autobiography, Literary
Journalism/Reportage, Personal Narratives, Travelogue, Reflection Essay,
True Narratives, Blogs, Testimonies, Other Forms)
MAKE CONNECTIONS
Congratulations for answering Task 1. You will encounter some of
them in Task 2. Try how well you can recognize them as you read the given
text.
Task 2: Search Me
Directions: Read the given text carefully and try to answer questions 1-3.
After that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, I was the only
subject. Simmons invited no more candidates to the platform. I performed alone every
night the rest of the fortnight. Up to that time a dozen wise old heads, the intellectual
aristocracy of the town had held out as implacable unbelievers. I was hurt by this as if I
were engaged in some honest occupation. There is nothing surprising about this.
Human beings feel dishonour the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it.
(From The Autobiography of Mark Twain).
1. In this text, find out which of the following is considered by Mark Twain.
Get the literary devices used from the list below.
second person point of view
first person point of view
personification
parallelism
characters
imagery
symbols
setting
theme
Task 3: Moving On
Directions: Read the recounted experience carefully and answer questions 1-3.
DEEPEN YOUR
UNDERSTANDING
Congratulations for doing task 3. Try to read and understand the
lecture below. You may also search the given literary techniques/devices and
literary criticism online.
• When was the work written? When was it published? How was it received by
the critics and public and why?
• What does the work’s reception reveal about the standards of taste and value
during the time it was published and reviewed?
• What social attitudes and cultural practices related to the action of the work
were prevalent during the time the work was written and published?
• What kind of power relationships does the word describe, reflect, or embody?
• How do the power relationships reflected in the literary work manifest
themselves in the cultural practices and social institutions prevalent during the
time the work was written and published?
• To what extent can we understand the past as it is reflected in the literary
work? To what extent does the work reflect differences from the ideas and
values of its time?
4. Marxist Criticism:
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the
product of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as
they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than
viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as
material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works
are viewed as a product of work (and hence of the realm of production and
consumption we call economics).
The suggested questions in the given literary criticisms or approaches will guide
you to conceptualize your analysis/critique accordingly. You will analyze which questions
are you going to answer for the introduction, which questions will be considered for the
body, and which of the questions will be reflected in your conclusion.
As critic, your decision on what to critique in the writer’s work is still crucial.
Therefore, not all suggested questions in the given approaches will be answered
when writing your critique. Anyway, there are still other critical approaches available
online and in literary criticism books. You may also consider those approaches.
Directions: Find out how the writer reveals the character in the given situations. The
choices are given below.
A. By describing directly the person’s traits, or special qualities
B. By appearance
C. By actions and speech
D. By private thoughts
E. By the responses of other characters
1. Janet sneered, “I can’t stand Esmeralda. She’s such a snob.”
2. Esmeralda always wore gray. In fact, she looked like a small gray mouse.
3. Esmeralda rarely smiled and could be found every afternoon in the library,
taking notes on some worthwhile subject--- but she sometimes looked
dreamily out the window. Yesterday she lost her composure. “Can’t you
tell those squealing roller skaters to play somewhere else?” the librarian
was shocked.
4. Esmeralda wondered why she wasn’t like other kids her age. Why did she
sit poring over a book, while others were laughing and skating in the sun?
5. Esmeralda was the most serious person in school. She longed for fun, but she
was afraid of disappointing her aunt, who was also very serious.
The Hot Zone captures the terrifying true story of an Ebola outbreak that
made its way from the jungles of Africa to a research lab just outside of Washington,
D.C. In the excerpt below, author Richard Preston describes the symptoms of this
deadly virus as they appeared in one of its first known human victims.
The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the
agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum Cave, January 8, 1980;
Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work
and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached,
and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his
head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His
housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently
hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t
know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became
nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned
into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all
appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed,
paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar
appearance; as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half closed at the same
time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they
turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with a brilliant starlike red
speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary
housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality
changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown
away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to
know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about
him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-
white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet
and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer
able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of
Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and
could not come up with any explanation for what had happened to his eyes or his face or
his mind. Thinking that he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him
injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private
hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth
the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he
seemed able to travel by himself. He had money; he understood he had to get to
Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.
A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from
every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes.
The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day:
Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the
life form inside him had entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that
seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and
sparkling, dotted with the dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and
banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small
farms. The commuter flights that drone across Africa are often jammed with people,
and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters
of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going
down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane
was crossing the Eastern rift valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the
place where the human species was born. They say specks of huts clustered inside
circles of thorn bush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers
moaned, and the Friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy rift clouds,
and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and
you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and
the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not
have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat.
There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough
and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances
around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red,
mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the
color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots,
which a few days before had started out as star-like speckles, have expanded and
merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows: his whole head is turning black-
and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is
dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the underlying bone, as if the face is
detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the
vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long
after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim
with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is
not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry
granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a
slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally
hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The
smell of the vomito negro fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming
with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag is bulging
and softening threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant.
When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus
particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has
undergone "extreme amplification." This is not something like the common cold. By
the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may
contain a hundred million particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life
form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not
entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh
mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in
Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture
something inside him. His blood is clotting up and his bloodstream is throwing clots, and
the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are
becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole
body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his
intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines
are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer
because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality
is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the
liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton.
Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are
winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain,
the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles
Monet has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.
The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose
and he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, clotless,
arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because
the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper
towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the
towels soak through.
When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass
him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all
right. Maybe he doesn’t travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and
people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin. . . and you ask him,
weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles
words you can’t understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on
forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot
virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an
offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to
speak. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t seem to find
words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day of the week or
explain what has happened to them. (Source: https://www.pbs.org)
TASK 6: I Believe
Directions: Complete the given statement with your viewpoints/reflections.
__________________________________________________________________.
ENRICH YOUR LEARNING
Great Job! Let’s read and be inspired with the great experience of our next writer.
TASK 8: At LAST!
You may refer to the suggested questions in the given approaches except
from the moral/philosophical approach that we used in the previous activity.
Consider an approach and choose questions to discuss in your critique.
In the short story” Once Upon a Time” Nadine Gordimer resists the
dominant discourses of South African apartheid by examining the ways in
which its social and economic machinery corroded and deformed the lives of
the white upper class as much as it did the black and immigrant underclasses.
She critiques the dominant political belief that black and white people under
apartheid were free to develop separately but equally in their own homelands
and examines the ways in which the economic system underlying apartheid
created isolation, paranoia, and violence not only for native Africans and
immigrants but for the white ruling class that ostensibly benefitted the most
from the system.
REFERENCES
Applebee, Arthur N., et al. (2000). The language of literature: United States of
America: McDougal Littell Inc.
Daniel, Kathleen, et al. (2000). Elements of literature: United States of America:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Dobie, Ann B. (2015). Theory into practice: An introduction to literary criticism. 4th
edition. United States of America: Cengage Learning
https://docplayer.net/2101047-literary-criticism-an-overview-of-approaches.html or
https://academia.edu
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