• Presentation: W 2/27 Patricia, Cindy, Kathy, Edgar, Sam

• Final Paper Due : Wed, March 20 by 10:30am @ SSB 245

Announcements

Transnational Existentialismidentity: essentialism or nihilism?

• (post)colonial vs postcolonial is there ever an end to colonizing power?– Dr. Monson’s visit to Manila

• Is it futile to search for the definitions of good/evil & right/wrong?– Context of WWII Holocaust vs atomic bomb

• Existentialism “existence precedes essence”• What defines one’s life when there are no abstract and

overarching systems to believe in?– “Side by side on the sofa they discussed his father and her daughter”

(19)– What is the relationship between Dr. Monson and Connie Escobar?

(post)colonial existentialism

Woman & Nation

• Pepe vs Paco (35)• heterosexual desire inextricable from nationalist

feeling (39):“The astonishment had renewed itself all the time he was in Manila, every time he looked up and suddenly saw that sleeping woman outlined against the sky and it changed the indifference with which he had come to his father’s country into a stirring of clan-emotion – a glow, almost, of homecoming” (35)

Maria Makiling

• Maria Makiling = diwata – woodland fairy or nymph acting as guardian of Mt. Makiling

• Modernity& primitivism defines Manila (40)• La Vidal as Maria Makiling? (41)• Connie Escobar as Maria Makiling? (50)• Paco’s desire for Connie’s body (57)• Violated nation continues to haunt Paco (61)

• Paco’s fatalism vs Pepe’s existentialism (64)

• Why is the Philippines represented as wonderland?– 65 Paco and Dr. Monson

• How and why are the characters who visit the Philippines represented as “will-deprived ghosts” (73)?

“Through the looking glass”

• Macho – southern plantation owner– Telemako = Telemachus– Relationship with La Vidal corruption

of northern and southern islands (120)

• Mary Texeira – Paco’s wife– Simone de Beauvoir – “being for

others” vs “being for self”– “She moved a little away from Paco,

as though to declare her identity; but, awake, she enjoyed, and avidly watching, she shared his sleep, as she had shared the restlessness of the nights before. Those restless nights had told her over and over again that she was no longer ‘I’ but an ‘us’…”(124)

Pt 2: Macho

• “300 years in the convent and 50 years in Hollywood”

• La Vidal as Maganda (156) aesthetics without ethics– Multiple implications of Maganda in

Tagalog: beautiful vs good

• La Vidal’s marriages = barometer of nation’s ethical state symbolized by cock’s crowing– Esteban Borromeo – bastard of the

unfinished revolution (170)– Entrance into the convent? (183)– Manolo Vidal – American collaborator

and abortion doctor (178)Pt 3: La Vidal

• God is dead so either:– Nothing matters; party like a rock star (nihilism)– We must create our own value system; choose

your own soul (existentialism)

• Connie as nihilist:– two navels as salvation through rejection of the

world (199)– “absolutley alone” (200)– “’you retreated not from evil, but only from the

struggle against evil” (202)– “’But you’ve got to choose,’ said Father Tony,

‘and you’ve got to feel responsible’” (203)

• What does Pepe tell her about her navels? Does it even matter?

Nihilism vs Existentialism