UNITAS Journal

The first novel in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s (1925-2006) Buru Tetralogy, titled Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind, 1980), is set in late nineteenth-century Indonesia and is mostly about the rise and emergence of the notions of the modern world (dunia modern) and of the nation (bangsa) and nationalism in the young hero Minke. This study proposes the use of Pramoedya’s novel as a preliminary bounded corpus for exploring the semantic domains of the related terms dunia (world), bumi (earth) in Bahasa Indonesia. In the novel, the term dunia appears primarily in the phrase dunia modern (modern world), which is depicted as inseparable from its technology, science and capital. Bumi (earth) on the other hand, plays a crucial conceptual role in the novel, in the oft-repeated phrase Bumi Manusia (earth of mankind). The study will try to show how these two terms, dunia modern and bumi manusia, display a complex and often contradictory relationship in their use within the novel.

ESL team teaching (TT) often occurs between native English-speaker (NES) teachers and non-native English-speaker (NNES) teachers in nursery schools and secondary schools in some countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Nigeria as a way of bringing authentic language input to EFL classrooms and enhancing the quality of teaching and learning English. Up to now, no research on TT in Vietnam’s context has been found. This paper reports on a case study on TT of 3 Vietnamese English teachers teaching a tertiary level English writing class, and its aim is to discover both the students’ and the teachers’ attitudes towards TT using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research designs and a reflective teaching approach.

This paper lays bare the re-working of the ideologemes in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in Vicente Groyon’s novel The Sky Over Dimas (2003). Ideologemes, in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, are inherited narrative para¬digms which are constitutive of a class discourse. In his postmodern work, Groyon modifies the ideologeme of the white patriarch’s ‘grand design’ in Absalom, Absalom! and the ideologeme of renunciation in Go Down, Moses which undermine racist ideologies, to provisionalize Bacolod history, thus reifying both class discourses as gossip and speculation.

In narratives of the manananggal in Filipino literature, women self-segment and feed on human fetuses and internal organs to sustain themselves. The manananggal’s body bisects, leaving the lower half of it somewhere safe and the upper half flying to find sustenance. Using the stories as examples, this paper seeks to explore the profound transformation whereby the belief in the cannibalistic feature of the viscera sucker is not only an inversion by the Spanish friars to discredit the babaylan of her crucial role in Filipino society but as also arising from a sense of women’s sexual and maternal agency surrounding their bodies. This paper seeks to problematize traditional readings and to re-think traditional attitudes to the body. It examines how and why female transgressive desire finds its ideal expression through the manananggal in Filipino literature.

Any human life is subject to contingency, accidents, and gratuitous occurrences that seem like fate or destiny. Each one occupies variable subject-positions depending on time-space coordinates: here, the places where the poet succes¬sively lived. But space undergoes dialectical transformations, as the subject grows up and experiences diremption: the diverse others interpellate and reconfigure the trajectory of her adventure. While the Filipino subject evolves by sublating the Others and producing self-consciousness by going through the ordeals of death and rebirth, its quest for self-determination is concretized by the crucial events of the nation that construct the metamorphic identity of the poet coeval with the popular forces (workers, peasants) that unite to engender the organic intellectual of a counterhegemonic formation.

Ang sanaysay ay poetika ng manunulat sa pagsulat ng maiklingmaikling kwentong kasya sa character ng SMS at tweet. Iminamapa ng sanaysay ang paghahabi ng makabagong anyong online bilang lunduyan ng sawikain, aporismo, bugtong, at maikling naratibo. Politikal ang layon sa experimen¬tasyon sa porma at laman, para makapanghamig ng maalam, mapagtanong at mapanghamong reaksyon mula sa mambabasa na may kapasidad rin mismo na makapagpalawig pa ng naturang anyo, laman at interogasyon sa sariling posts at komento sa mga social media platform. Ang ikalawang bahagi ng artikulo ay mga halimbawang bunga ng naturang experimentasyon, partikular sa pagdalumat sa kontemporaryong konsepto ng haka-haka, sapantaha, spekulasyon at guni-guning alternatibong imahinaryo at posibilidad sa pagmumundo ng sandali, tagpo at pagkatao.

This paper argues for a view of translation as creative writing, doing so via a reading of three texts clustered around the signifier “Nietzsche”. The first part of the paper is an examination of the philosophical translations Friedrich Nietzsche deploys in his analyses of ethics, power, and nations. The second part of the paper presents the literary appropriation of Nietzsche by Faustino Aguilar in his novel “Nagalunod sa Katihan”. Translating mainly from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Aguilar distorts and decontextualizes Zarathustra’s aphorisms and sayings, going so far as to turn a derogatory term into praise. Nietzsche philosophy for individuals roaming the intellectual mountains of Western Europe is deconstructed, given new life, an afterlife, as one of many tools in Aguilar’s project for envisioning a modern Filipino nation. The third part of the paper is a meditation on the nature and aims of translation. To be faithful to Nietzsche’s views on power, one must not be stuck to the letter of his texts.