Digital Commons Network^™

Pantayong Pananaw And The History Of Philippine Political Concepts, Ramon Guillermo

Kritika Kultura

Zeus A. Salazar’s approach in writing the history of political concepts in the Philippines represents one of the most challenging and insightful directions within his complex body of work. However, despite its positive contribution to this area of study, it seems that further advances towards a more productive and empirical direction is hampered by certain unnecessarily restrictive assumptions. This study is a preliminary critique of a significant flaw in his approach which gives priority to the etymological meaning of rootwords as opposed to a more empirically oriented approach based on the study of the “semantic fields” of concepts and the …

Paraphrasing Europe: Translation In Contemporary Filipino History, Portia L. Reyes, Ramon Guillermo

Kritika Kultura

This paper studies three annotated translations into Filipino that have been inspired by the controversial historiographical movement called Pantayong Pananaw (from us-for us perspective), which argued for the use of the national language in academic study: San Agustin’s 1720 letter (by Dedina Lapar), Canseco’s 1897 account of Cavite during the Philippine Revolution (by Rhommel Hernandez), and Marx and Engel’s 1848 Communist Manifesto (by Zeus Salazar). In seeking to understand the translational practices that assist in the production and institutionalization of knowledge today, we ask: what transpires in the Filipinization of an account? In which way is translation significant to indigenization …

Jose Garcia Villa: Vicissitudes Of Necolonial Art-Fetsishism And The "Beautiful Soul" Of The Filipino Exile, E. San Juan Jr.

Kritika Kultura

The publication of Jose Garcia-Villa’s Doveglion: Collected Poems by Penguin Books in 2008 is remarkable not because it reveals a renewed interest in Villa’s work (as Luis Francia claims in the introduction of the book) but because it presents the nostalgic posthumous return of the repressed. Francia, a Villa critic, fails to situate the poet in the context of the Philippines’ neocolonial status. Francia’s mapping of Villa’s trajectory as a poet is teleological; it elides those historical contexts that allowed US imperialist power to dominate the Philippine political economy in certain periods. Timothy Yu, a Chinese-American Stanford scholar, contends that …

Resisting Boundaries: An Interview With Suchen Christine Lim, Lawrence L. Ypil

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Portrait Gallery: Agusto Fauni Espiritu's Five Faces Of Exile, Gerald Burns

Kritika Kultura

Espiritu writes a book which may be described as a “collective intellectual biography” of five figures in Philippine letters whose lives and texts were influenced by their expatriation in America: Carlos P. Romulo, Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and Bienvenido Santos. With a biographer’s touch, Espiritu identifies the themes that are more or less common and played out differently among them: performativity, ambivalence, nationalism in their self-representation, cultural hybridity, and patronage relations—leading to what may be called a genuine “transnational” perspective for Asian American intellectual history. However, his use of other big terms such as “exile,” “nation,” “Filipino” …

Scenes Of Translation: Responses To Responses, Vicente L. Rafael

Kritika Kultura

In his “Response to Responses,” Vicente Rafael thanks and answers the questions raised during the forum. To Gary Devilles’s comment of his “remaining silent” in the way translation can be “radicalized into an ethical technology or a strategic pedagogy,” Rafael offers the trope of revenge—a desire for justice, which results from the Spanish misrecognition of Filipino attempts at translation—and the language of secrecy and solidarity of the 1896 Revolution—which results from the failure of Castilian to become lingua franca—as political technics in themselves. To Ramon Guillermo’s comment of the book’s impoverished, restrictive, and imprecise notions of translation, Rafael reiterates and …

Commentary On The Promise Of The Foreign, Remmon E. Barbaza

Kritika Kultura

Guided by key Heideggerian insights, this review focuses on two points: 1) the relationship between what is foreign and what is one’s own; 2) language and history. The promise of the foreign belongs to the allure of the unknown, and the impulse to know the unknown belongs to the “de-distancing” character of the human—the tendency of human beings to bring things to nearness, thereby negating the distance that stands between them and the things they encounter in the world. Rafael has shown that the Filipinos were driven by the desire to bring what is foreign (in their case, Spain) near …

Response To The Promise Of The Foreign, Roland Tolentino

Kritika Kultura

In his “Response to The Promise of the Foreign,” Roland Tolentino generates a battery of provocative questions that seeks to resituate Rafael’s trope of “the foreign,” particularly in the field of Philippine Studies. Here, Tolentino asks nine questions that open up “the foreign” into zones of contacts with other contexts: the foreign in relation to the linguistic context of the period; its relationship with the vernacular, particularly in the case of the recodification of the baybayin; its involvement with act of writing and rewriting; its viability as a social project and its political efficacy; the foreign and its relation to …

A Book Review Of The Promise Of The Foreign, Ramon Guillermo

Kritika Kultura

Primarily taking issue with Rafael’s definition of translation as “that double process of appropriating and replacing what is foreign while keeping its foreignness in view,” this review attempts to show the unusually restrictive nature of this definition and proposes a more empirical approach to the study of translation and lexicalization.

A Book Review Of Vicente L. Rafael's The Promise Of The Foreign, Gary C. Devilles

Kritika Kultura

The book The Promise of the Foreign is without doubt well-written and contributes to our understanding of the fundamental assumptions informing nationalist discourse, as well as the contradictions and complex realities at work in Philippine society. However, the book is arguably silent on how such translation can also be radicalized into an ethical technology or strategic pedagogy such that the foreign within various socio-political sites of analysis like the natives, masses, the Chinese are not just regarded as contaminations between the Philippines and the outside but rather as ambiguities that create the conditions of possibility of the nation-state and its …

A Reaction To "Modernist Poetic Practices In English Poetry From Southeast Asia: A Comparison Between Jose Garcia Villa And Arthur Yap", Jonathan Chua

Kritika Kultura

This follow-through develops Patke’s characterization of Jose Garcia Villa as a heroic figure by an account of the reception to his poetry in the Philippines since World War II. Villa’s insistence on the primacy of art alienated him from critics in the late sixties and seventies who saw him as a “mental colony.” Later postcolonial criticism, however, allowed for a more favorable interpretation of Villa.

Writing Fiction: Imagination, History, And Voice In Singapore Fiction, Suchen Christine Lim

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Caveats On The Problem Of Understanding Peirce's Semiotics And Pragmatism, E. San Juan Jr.

Kritika Kultura

“Caveats” is San Juan’s response to “Addendum” in which he praises Stecconi’s focus on Peirce’s theory of knowledge rather than merely on his linguistic paradigm. San Juan, however, disagrees with Stecconi for “conflating the various pragmatisms into one lump.” San Juan prefers to regard Peirce as “a moderate realist” and reiterates the potential relevance of Pierce’s semiotics to the global war on terrorism and the Sri Lankan civil war.

The Case Of The Disappearing Filipino American Houseboy: Speculation On Double Indemnity And The United States Imperialism, Victor Bascara

Kritika Kultura

The creations of a new cultural formation, US imperialism, development, and globalization are traced in this article by the use of James M. Cain’s 1936 pulp novella-turned-film Double Indemnity. Representations of the Fil-Am houseboy, his disappearance and re-appearance in the texts, provide an impetus for discovering the cultural transitions from the colonial to the postcolonial periods.

Signs, Meaning, Interpretation: C. S. Peirce's Critique Of Deconstruction And Post-Structuralism, E. San Juan Jr.

Kritika Kultura

From the perspective of Peircian semiotics, this paper presents a prolegomenon of “a science of pragmaticist aesthetics.” Following the fundamental epistemological categories of C. S. Pierce, San Juan reads Michael’s Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost as unraveling the anatomy of terror in Sri Lanka. Such a reading, for San Juan, “elicit signs of whether we, and others in the collaborative enterprise, embody,” quoting Pierce, “an intelligence capable of learning by experience.”

En-Gendering Desire In Aida Santos's Lesbian Poetry, Danicar Mariano

Kritika Kultura

Lesbian feminist literary criticism seeks to deconstruct the essential categories of male and female and their “natural” link to the production of desire, enabling an insightful criticism that formalism and feminism alone cannot fully venture in. Thus, this lesbian feminist literary reading of Aida Santos’s poetry critiques heteropatriarchy in language, desire and gender by questioning the binary assumption operative in them. A binary logic defines women and men by what each are not, highlighting one sex over the other, and presenting them as in need each other. This patriarchal assumption intersects with compulsory heterosexuality to marginalize lesbian existence in the …

Bending English For The Filipino Stage, Binevenido L. Lumbera

Kritika Kultura

Through representative examples of Filipino plays in English that were written during the American colonial regime, the article traces how playwriting and the theater were instrumental in teaching the English language to Filipinos educated in the American educational project. To make the transition from the local languages to the newly acquired English easier to contextualize, the English in the colonial-period plays was consciously stylized to sound “as though [the characters] were speaking in their own tongues”—thus the phrase ‘bending English’. Having “bent English” indeed does make reading easier for Filipinos, however the performances of plays with “bent English” provide a …

Interview With Gina Apostol, Daryll Delgado

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Fostering Conceptual Roles For Change: Identity And Agency In Esea Teacher Preparation, Brian Morgan

Kritika Kultura

English Changing, the theme and title of the 2009 ESEA conference held in Manila, raises specific challenges for language teacher education: To what extent do we prepare teachers to be passive recipients of the social, cultural, and economic changes that align with the global spread of English? Alternatively, how might we encourage teachers to become active participants—“agents of change”—through their mediation and implementation of language curricula and pedagogy? The author addresses such questions by first reflecting on his own personal and professional development in EFL and EAP teaching contexts. These experiences are then related to the growing research literature in …

World Englishes And Higher Education, Ahmar Mahboob

Kritika Kultura

This paper explores the relationship between World Englishes and Higher Education by focusing on the meaning making resources used by “users” of different varieties/dialects of World Englishes. The results of the study indicate that if we focus on the “uses” of language in particular contexts, we find patterns of similarities that are shared by speakers of diverse varieties of World Englishes. These findings support the broader literature on genres that show that language patterns on use—that is, patterns in language relate to specific contexts of use. In such contexts, the identity of the user seems to be less important than …

The Collected Poems Of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), Edited By Christina Scull And Wayne G. Hammond., John R. Holmes

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John R. Holmes, of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024), edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond

Utilizing Large Language Models To Synthesize Product Desirability Datasets, John D. Hastings, Sherri Weitl-Harms, Joseph Doty, Zachary L. Myers, Warren Thompson

Research & Publications

This research explores the application of large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets for Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT) testing, a key component in evaluating user sentiment and product experience. Utilizing gpt-4o-mini, a cost-effective alternative to larger commercial LLMs, three methods, Word+Review, Review+Word, and Supply-Word, were each used to synthesize 1000 product reviews. The generated datasets were assessed for sentiment alignment, textual diversity, and data generation cost. Results demonstrated high sentiment alignment across all methods, with Pearson correlations ranging from 0.93 to 0.97. Supply-Word exhibited the highest diversity and coverage of PDT terms, although with increased generation costs. Despite minor …

Full Issue

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema, Vetri Nathan

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that …

Partisan Rhetoric And Polarization: The Year In C-Span Archives Research, Volume 10

The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research

Partisan Rhetoric and Polarization: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 10 features chapters written from a variety of perspectives that address divisions in American politics. The topics range widely, including TikTok, abortion, the middle class, the January 6 riot, and partisan rhetoric in Congress. The unifying theme of the volume is that each author uses C-SPAN videos to examine how members of Congress and other elites speak and act on these issues. Two other thoughtful pieces examine Supreme Court justices speaking off the bench and emotional reactions in presidential debates. Partisan Rhetoric and Polarization provides context to understand how …

New Trends In The Study Of Haredi Culture And Society, David N. Myers, Nechumi Malovicki-Yaffe

The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review

Who are Haredim? And why are they the source of both increasing attention and continuing misunderstanding? New Trends in the Study of Haredi Culture and Society draws on the innovative research of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines—including history, religious studies, demography, linguistics, and geography—to trace the growing prominence of Haredi (often called ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Jewish life. Haredi Jews are committed to preserving a measure of segregation from the rest of society consistent with the guiding principles of their forebears; yet increasingly, they are appearing more visibly and assertively in public spaces. Demographic analysis suggests that they will …

Table Of Contents

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Triangulating The Likelihood Of Confusion: Linguistics And Consumer Surveys, Eric Derosia, Jesse Egbert, Thomas Lee

BYU Law Review

This Article highlights contributions that linguistic analysis can offer in the assessment of the likelihood of confusion in trademark infringement cases. Parties in such cases often engage an expert witness to conduct a survey that measures the likelihood of consumer confusion. We show how an expert linguist can provide important, nonintuitive dynamics of corroboration. We introduce “expert triangulation” as a conceptual framework to analyze whether, and to what extent, experts in linguistics and consumer surveys can corroborate one another. That is, having two different sources of empirical evidence which lead to similar conclusions should be a benefit to the courts, …

Corpus Linguistics At The U.S. Patent And Trademark Office, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

BYU Law Review

This Article examines the intersection of corpus linguistics and patent law. It introduces the foundations of corpus linguistics and its application to the law and advances the potential for its application to patent examination at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Historically, the disciplines of corpus linguistics and patent law did not intersect until scholars began to consider the application of corpus linguistics to patent litigation for interpretation of terms in patent claims. Interpretation of legal language provided by corpus linguistics and applied to patent examination at the USPTO has yet to be addressed and is a novel …

Going Generic: A Linguistics Approach To Genericide In Trademark Law, James A. Heilpern, William G. Eggington, Earl Kjar Brown, Zachary D. Smith

BYU Law Review

This Article examines the phenomenon of trademark genericide—the process by which once-protected brand names like “escalator” and “trampoline” lose their legal status by becoming synonymous with entire product categories. Traditional methods used by courts to assess genericide, such as consumer surveys and dictionary definitions, are often criticized for their subjectivity and lack of scientific rigor. In response, this Article introduces corpus linguistics as a more reliable, data-driven alternative for determining whether a trademark has become generic.

By analyzing real-world language usage through large corpora, corpus linguistics can track the public’s shifting perceptions of a trademark over time. Using case studies …