What To Do Prior To Critical Engagement

Before we begin our discussions of the selected texts, a quick refresher. This is an important lesson I have learned from Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, one of my professors in Women's Literature:

What a work of fiction does is create a world, an imagined world, which may or may not have a correspondence with what we call the real world”. The reader is expected to enter this world and for the duration of the story, live in it, in effect. The technical term for that activity, the seduction – willing or unwilling, wholehearted or half-hearted – of the reader (an activity prior to critical engagement) is “suspension of disbelief”. To the extent that the writer has done his job well, the seduction will last, the spell will hold.

Before any analysis can take place, the reader needs to be able to define or describe that world into which the text has introduced him or her.

It will be assumed that students are familiar with the following basic questions, and that they realize that the answers to these questions will be the first basis for any readings of a literary text.

Ø What is the world of the story?
Ø What are the people who inhabit it like?
Ø How is the reader able to determine this?
Ø What is the story about?
Ø What effect (in the reader) does it seem to want to bring about?
Ø How does it to do this? (What techniques? strategies? devices?)
Ø Are these methods particularly striking? particularly original? particularly imaginative?

One of the first things I usually ask my students to do is describe the story. I want to find out their impression of the story. This may involve a synopsis of the story which is already an indication of how the students understood the story. The critical engagement follows.

While in the discussion of Love and the Erotic in the literature of women (a sub-topic in Imaging the Filipino Woman) I will be posting in this site lectures of Dr. Hidalgo, including a critical analysis of The Bird (Tita Lacambra Ayala) which appeared in her Gentle Subversion: Essays on Philippine Fiction, 1998.