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11/12
21st Century Literature from the
Philippines and the World

QUARTER 2
WEEK 3

Capsulized Self-Learning Empowerment Toolkit

Schools Division Office of Zamboanga City

Region IX – Zamboanga Peninsula
Zamboanga City

“Unido, Junto avanza con el EduKalidad Cree, junto junto puede!”

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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CapSLET
Capsulized Self-Learning Empowerment Toolkit

21st
Century
Literature
from the
SUBJECT &
GRADE/LEVEL Philippines QUARTER 2 WEEK 3 DAY -----------------------
and the dd/mm/yyyy

World

Grade 11/12
TOPIC Anthology of 21st Century World Literature: North America
Identify representative texts and authors from Asia, North
America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
LEARNING Code: Objectives:
COMPETENCY EN12Lit-IIa-22 ∗ Define Gothic as a literary theme; and
∗ identify Gothic elements from a text.

IMPORTANT: Do not write anything on this material.

UNDERSTAND
Representative Text from North America

Gothic-themed stories appeal to readers by exploring human psychology, fear, death, and
imagination incorporating psychology into their themes, making the supernatural more believable
and realistic. Choice of words, sentence structure and symbols are also used to make gothic theme/
style to be more felt and understood by the reader.

Some Elements of Gothic Literature

o Mystery and Fear. As it involves subjects beyond scientific understanding, Gothic literature
evokes feelings of suspense and fear.

o Atmosphere and Setting. The physical location of a scene, as the atmosphere and environment
of a Gothic story contributes greatly to the feeling of fear and uneasiness.

o Emotional Distress. Highly-charged emotion is used to convey a thought, and melodramatic

and impassioned language to convey the panic and terror felt by its characters.

o Nightmares. Most Gothic stories incorporate nightmares to depict visions of fear and death.

Stephen E. King (1947- ) made his first professional short story

sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In 1973, Doubleday &
Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. He has since
published over 50 books and has become one of the world's most
successful writers. King is the recipient of the 2003 National
Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the
American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.

SAQ-1: What do you think makes us fascinated with horror stories?

SAQ-2: Amidst progress in science, why is Gothic literature still popular?

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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Let’s Practice! (Write your answers on a separate sheet.)

Doctor Sleep is a 2013 novel by American writer Stephen E. King and the sequel to another,
The Shining (1977). Following the events of The Shining, after receiving a settlement from the owners
of the Overlook Hotel, Danny Torrance remains traumatized as his mother recovers from her injuries.
As an adult, he settles in the small town of Frazier, New Hampshire. His psychic abilities re-emerge
and allow him to provide comfort to dying patients. Aided by a cat, “Azzie,” that can sense when
someone is about to die, Danny acquires the nickname “Doctor Sleep.”

The excerpt below lists the “lockboxes” Danny created in his mind to contain the ghosts,
including that of the former owner of the Overlook Hotel.

Lockbox

1. On the second day of December in a year when a Georgia peanut farmer was doing business
in the White House, one of Colorado’s great resort hotels burned to the ground. The Overlook was
declared a total loss. After an investigation, the fire marshal of Jicarilla County ruled the cause had
been a defective boiler. The hotel was closed for the winter when the accident occurred, and only
four people were present. Three survived. The hotel’s off-season caretaker, John Torrance, was
killed during an unsuccessful (and heroic) effort to dump the boiler's steam pressure, which had
mounted to disastrously high levels due to an inoperative relief valve.

Two of the survivors were the caretaker’s wife and young son. The third was the Overlook’s
chef, Richard Hallorann, who had left his seasonal job in Florida and come to check on the
Torrances because of what he called “a powerful hunch” that the family was in trouble. Both
surviving adults were quite badly injured in the explosion. Only the child was unhurt.

Physically, at least.

2. Wendy Torrance and her son received a settlement from the corporation that owned the
Overlook. It wasn’t huge, but enough to get them by for the three years she was unable to work
because of back injuries. A lawyer she consulted told her that if she were willing to hold out and
play tough, she might get a great deal more, because the corporation was anxious to avoid a court
case. But she, like the corporation, wanted only to put that disastrous winter in Colorado behind
her. She would convalesce, she said, and she did, although back injuries plagued her until the end
of her life. Shattered vertebrae and broken ribs heal, but they never cease crying out.

Winifred and Daniel Torrance lived in the mid-South for a while, then drifted down to
Tampa. Sometimes Dick Hallorann (he of the powerful hunches) came up from Key West to visit
with them. To visit with young Danny especially. They shared a bond.

One early morning in March of 1981, Wendy called Dick and asked if he could come. Danny,
she said, had awakened her in the night and told her not to go in the bathroom.

After that, he refused to talk at all.

3. He woke up needing to pee. Outside, a strong wind was blowing. It was warm — in Florida
it almost always was — but he did not like that sound, and supposed he never would. It reminded
him of the Overlook, where the defective boiler had been the very least of the dangers.

He and his mother lived in a cramped second-floor tenement apartment. Danny left the little
room next to his mother’s and crossed the hall. The wind gusted and a dying palm tree beside the
building clattered its leaves. The sound was skeletal. They always left the bathroom door open
when no one was using the shower or the toilet, because the lock was broken. Tonight the door was
closed. Not because his mother was in there, however. Thanks to facial injuries she’d suffered at
the Overlook, she now snored—a soft queep-queep sound—and he could hear it coming from her
bedroom.

Well, she closed it by accident, that’s all.

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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He knew better, even then (he was possessed of powerful hunches and intuitions himself),
but sometimes you had to know. Sometimes you had to see. This was something he had found out
at the Overlook, in a room on the second floor.

Reaching with an arm that seemed too long, too stretchy, too boneless, he turned the knob
and opened the door.

The woman from Room 217 was there, as he had known she would be. She was sitting naked
on the toilet with her legs spread and her pallid thighs bulging. Her greenish breasts hung down
like deflated balloons. The patch of hair below her stomach was gray. Her eyes were also gray, like
steel mirrors. She saw him, and her lips stretched back in a grin.

Close your eyes, Dick Hallorann had told him once upon a time. If you see something bad,
close your eyes and tell yourself it’s not there and when you open them again, it will be gone.

But it hadn’t worked in Room 217 when he was five, and it wouldn't work now. He knew it.
He could smell her. She was decaying.

The woman — he knew her name, it was Mrs. Massey — lumbered to her purple feet,
holding out her hands to him. The flesh on her arms hung down, almost dripping. She was smiling
the way you do when you see an old friend. Or, perhaps, something good to eat.

With an expression that could have been mistaken for calmness, Danny closed the door
softly and stepped back. He watched as the knob turned right … left … right again … then stilled.

He was eight now, and capable of at least some rational thought even in his horror. Partly
because, in a deep part of his mind, he had been expecting this. Although he had always thought it
would be Horace Derwent who would eventually show up. Or perhaps the bartender, the one his
father had called Lloyd. He supposed he should have known it would be Mrs. Massey, though,
even before it finally happened. Because of all the undead things in the Overlook, she had been the
worst.

The rational part of his mind told him she was just a fragment of unremembered bad dream
that had followed him out of sleep and across the hall to the bathroom. That part insisted that if he
opened the door again, there would be nothing there. Surely there wouldn’t be, now that he was
awake. But another part of him, a part that shone, knew better. The Overlook wasn't done with him,
even yet. At least one of its vengeful spirits had followed him all the way to Florida. Once he had
come upon that woman sprawled in a bathtub. She had gotten out and tried to choke him with her
fishy (but terribly strong) fingers. If he opened the bathroom door now, she would finish the job.

He compromised by putting his ear against the door. At first there was nothing. Then he
heard a faint sound.

Dead fingernails scratching on wood.

Danny walked into the kitchen on not-there legs, stood on a chair, and peed into the sink.
Then he woke his mother and told her not to go into the bathroom because there was a bad thing
there. Once that was done, he went back to bed and sank deep beneath the covers. He wanted to
stay there forever, only getting up to pee in the sink. Now that he had warned his mother, he had no
interest in talking to her.

His mother knew about the no-talking thing. It had happened after Danny had ventured into
Room 217 at the Overlook.

“Will you talk to Dick?”

Lying in his bed, looking up at her, he nodded. His mother called, even though it was four in
the morning.

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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Late the next day, Dick came. He brought something with him. A present.

4. After Wendy called Dick — she made sure Danny heard her doing it — Danny went back
to sleep. Although he was now eight and in the third grade, he was sucking his thumb. It hurt her to
see him do that. She went to the bathroom door and stood looking at it. She was afraid — Danny
had made her afraid — but she had to go, and she had no intention of using the sink as he had. The
image of how she would look, teetering on the edge of the counter with her butt hanging over the
porcelain (even if there was no one there to see) made her wrinkle her nose.

In one hand she had the hammer from her little box of widow’s tools. As she turned the knob
and pushed the bathroom door open, she raised it. The bathroom was empty, of course, but the ring
of the toilet seat was down. She never left it that way before going to bed, because she knew if
Danny wandered in, only ten percent awake, he was apt to forget to put it up and piss all over it.
Also, there was a smell. A bad one. As if a rat had died in the walls.

She took a step in, then two. She saw movement and whirled, hammer upraised, to hit
whoever (whatever) was hiding behind the door. But it was only her shadow. Scared of her own
shadow, people sometimes sneered, but who had a better right than Wendy Torrance? After the
things she had seen and been through, she knew that shadows could be dangerous. They could have
teeth.

No one was in the bathroom, but there was a discolored smear on the toilet seat and another
on the shower curtain. Excrement was her first thought, but it wasn’t yellowish-purple. She looked
more closely and saw bits of flesh and decayed skin. There was more on the bathmat, in the shape
of footprints. She thought them too small — too dainty — to be a man's.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

She ended up using the sink after all.

Directions: Deduct the different Gothic elements found in the above excerpt from Stephen King’s
Doctor Sleep. Copy the table on a separate sheet, and fill it out by writing lines from the excerpt that
match with the identified Gothic elements.

GOTHIC ELEMENT LINES FROM THE DOCTOR SLEEP EXCERPT

1. Mystery and Fear
2. Atmosphere and Setting
3. Emotional Distress
4. Nightmares

REMEMBER
Key Points

 Gothic literature began as a modern theme in 1764 but has continued its influence even in
literary works produced in the 21st Century so far. It is characterized by expressions of terror,
narratives that swell on unexplained or supernatural elements, and dark, gloomy scenery. This
fictional genre encompasses many different elements.
 Because Gothic literature incorporates human psychology, paranormal or supernatural
characters and events appear to be realistic. Some defining elements of Gothic literature
include: mystery and fear, atmosphere and setting, emotional distress and nightmares. These
elements create characters and portrayals that evoke feelings of fear and dread from the
readers.
 Stephen King is an American novelist that has written more than 50 titles that are often
Gothic, specifically horror. One of his novels is Doctor Sleep (2013), which won the 2013
Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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TOPIC Anthology of 21st Century World Literature: Latin America

Identify representative texts and authors from Asia, North
America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Objectives:
LEARNING Code: ∗ Define the characteristics of contemporary and 21st
COMPETENCY EN12Lit-IIa-22 Century Latin American literature through its stages;
∗ list literary personalities from Latin America; and
∗ identify Latin American elements from a sample text.

UNDERSTAND
Representative Text from Latin America

Latin American literature encompasses literary pieces in Spanish, Portuguese, English and
indigenous languages from Central and South America and even Latinos based in the US. It rose to
global prominence in the second half of the 20 th Century due in part to the success of magic realism,
which originated from the continent. Nobel Prize for Literature winners from this region include:
Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967), Pablo Neruda (Chile,
1971), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia, 1982), Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1990) and Mario Vargas
Llosa (Peru, 2010).

Stages of Contemporary Latin American Literature

o Modernismo. (late 19th Century) The first truly Latin American literature pieces were
produced during this period, in that national differences were no longer so much at issue.

o Indigenismo. (early 20th Century) A movement dedicated to representing indigenous culture

and the injustices suffered by indigenous communities.

o Vanguardia. The use of new and daring themes and experimental literary forms.

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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o The Boom. (after World War II) Literary pieces with unique narration were released. Magic
realism was born during this period.

o Post-Boom/Contemporary. Writers explored themes of social realism through subjects based

on current social and political issues in Latin America. Feminism also emphasized as female
major characters became more common. Other authors utilized subjects from the continent’s
rich pre-colonial history.

Laura V. Esquivel (1950- ), although trained as a teacher, is a

Mexican novelist, screenwriter and a politician. Her works include the
novels Como agua para chocolate (1989), La ley del amor (1995),
Tan veloz como el deseo (2001), Malinche: novela (2006), A Lupita le
gusta planchar (2014) and El diario de Tita (2016). She also founded
a children’s theater workshop and wrote and produced dramas for
children.

SAQ-1: What is the historical link between Philippine and Latin American literatures?
SAQ-2: How can 21st Century literature be inspired by past historical events?

Let’s Practice! (Write your answers on a separate sheet.)

Malinche is a 2006 novel by Mexican writer Laura V. Esquivel. It tells about the tragic love
between the conquistador Hernan Cortes and Malinalli, his interpreter –thus, “The Tongue” –during
his conquest of the Aztecs. Malinalli’s Indian tribe has been conquered by the warrior Aztecs. When
Malinalli meets Cortes, she thinks that he is the returning god Quetzalcoatl who will destroy the
Aztec empire and free her people. In this particular excerpt below, Malinalli begins to learn her
power, something strange to her, as she was sold into slavery by her own mother.

Malinalli needed that silence to create new and resonant words. The right words, the ones
that were necessary. Recently she had stopped serving Portocarro, her lord, because Cortes had
named her “The Tongue,” the one who transcribed what he said into the Nahuatl language, and
what Montezuma’s messengers said, from Nahuatl to Spanish. Malinalli had learned Spanish at an
extraordinary speed, in no way could it be said that she was completely fluent. Often she had to
turn to Aguilar to help her translate it correctly, so that what she said made sense in the minds of
both the Spaniards and the Mexicans.

Being “The Tongue” was an enormous responsibility. She didn’t want to make a mistake or
misinterpret, and she couldn’t see how to prevent it since it was so difficult translating complex
ideas from one language to the other. She felt as if each time she uttered a word, she journeyed
back hundreds of generations. When she said the name of Ometeotl, the creator of the dualities
Omecihuatl and Ometecuhtli, the masculine and feminine principles, she put herself at the
beginning of creation. That was the power of the spoken word. But then, how can you contain in a
single word the god Ometeotl, he who is without shape, the lord who is not born and does not die;
whom water cannot wet, fire cannot burn, wind cannot move, and earth cannot bury? Impossible.
The same seemed to happen to Cortes, who couldn’t make her understand certain concepts of his
religion. Once she asked him what the name of God’s wife was.

“God doesn’t have a wife,” Cortes answered.

“It cannot be.”

“Why not?”

“Because without a womb, without darkness, light cannot emerge. It is from her greatest
depths that Mother Earth creates precious stones, and in the darkness of her womb that gods and
humans take forms. Without a womb there is no god.”

Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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Cortes stared intently at Malinalli and saw the light in the abyss of her eyes. It was a
moment of intense connection between them, but Cortes directed his eyes somewhere else, abruptly
disconnected himself from her, because he was frightened by that sensation of complicity, of
belonging, and he immediately tried to cut off the conversation between them, for aside from
everything else, it seemed too strange speaking about religious matters with her, a native in his
service.

“What do you know about God! Your gods demand all the blood in the world in order to
exist, while our God offers His own to us with each Communion. We drink His blood.”

Malinalli did not understand all of the words that Cortes had just uttered. What she wanted
to hear, what her brain wanted to interpret, was that the god of the Spaniards was a fluid god, for he
was in the blood, in the secret of the flesh, the secret of love; that he was contained in the eternity
of the universe. And she wanted to believe in such a deity.

“So then your god is liquid?” Malinalli asked enthusiastically.

“Liquid?”

“Yes. Didn’t you say that he was in the blood that he offered?”

“Yes, woman! But now answer me, do your gods offer you blood?”

“No.”

“Aha! Then you shouldn’t believe in them.”

“Malinalli’s eyes filled with tears as she replied.

“I don’t believe that they have to offer blood. I believe in your liquid god, I like that he is a
god who is constantly flowing, and that he manifests himself even in my tears. I like that he is
stern, strict, and just, that his anger could create or make the universe vanish in one day. But you
can’t have that without water or womb. For there to be songs and flowers, there needs to be water;
but it does not remain long on the earth. What is engendered in darkness, however, in profundity of
caves, like precious gems and golds, lasts much longer. They say that there is a place beyond the
sea, where there are higher mountains, and there, Mother Earth has plentiful water to fertilize the
earth; and here, in my land, we have deep caves and within them, great treasures are produced –”

“Really? What treasures? Where are these caves?”

Malinalli did not want to answer him and said that she did not know. His interruption
bothered her. It proved that Cortes was not interested in talking about his religion, or his gods, or
his beliefs, or even about her. It was clear that he was only interested in material treasures. She
excused herself and went to weep by the river.

This and many other things made it difficult for them to understand each other. Malinalli
believed that words colored memory, planting images each time that a thing was named. And as
flowers bloomed in the countryside after a rainfall, so that which was planted in the mind bore fruit
each time that word, moistened by saliva, named it. For example, the concept of true and eternal
god, which the Spaniards had proclaimed, in her mind had borne fruit because it had already been
planted there by her ancestors. From them she had also learned that things came to exist when you
named them, when you moistened them, when you painted them. God breathed through his word,
gave life through it, and because of this, because of the labor and grace of the God of All Things, it
was possible to paint in the mind of the Spaniards and Mexican new concepts, new ideas.

Being “The Tongue” was a great spiritual duty, for it meant putting all her being at the
service of the gods so that her tongue was part of the resounding system of the divinity, so that her
voice would spread through the cosmos the very meaning of existence. But Malinalli did not feel
up to the task. Very often, when translating, she let herself be guided by her feelings, and then the
voice of fear, fear of being unfaithful to the gods, of failure, fear of not being able to bear
Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School
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responsibility. And truthfully, also fear of power, of taking power.

Never before had she felt what it was like to be in charge. She soon found that whoever
controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power. And she discovered that when she
translated, she controlled the situation, and not only that but that words could be weapons. The finest
of weapons.

Directions: Using the lines below, explain how you understood the meaning of the closing sentences
from the excerpt of Laura V. Esquivel’s Malinche:

She soon found that whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power.
And she discovered that when she translated, she controlled the situation, and not only that but that
words could be weapons. The finest of weapons.
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________

REMEMBER
Key Points

 Latin American literature includes literary pieces written in Spanish and Portuguese from
nations that comprise Central and South America. Its greatest contribution to world literature is
magic realism.
 The history of the development of modern and contemporary Latin American literature
includes Modernismo, Indigenismo, Vanguardia, The Boom and Post-Boom. Magic realism
became identified with Latin American literature during The Boom period. Contemporary and
21st Century Latin American literature on the other hand was born during Post-Boom.
 The Post-Boom/Contemporary period can be identified through literary pieces that tackle social
issues and the rights and condition of women. In this period, writers used subjects from the rich
pre-colonial history of Latin America as bases for creative literary works.
 Laura V. Esquivel’s 2006 novel Malinche is a re-telling of the relationship between Malinalli –
an Indian woman who is portrayed in Mexican history as a traitor—and Hernan Cortes, the
Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztecs.

For further readings:

WEBSITES
Source: “Latin American Literature,” Encyclopædia Britannica, May 06, 2020,
accessed August 02, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/art/Latin-American-literature

Source: “Laura Esquivel,” GoodReads, 2020, accessed August 02,

2020, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4694.Laura_Esquivel

Source: “Malinche [Excerpt] by Laura Esquivel (Mexico),” January 21, 2019, accessed
August 02, 2020, https://versozanelson.blogspot.com/2019/01/malinche-by-laura-esquivel-

Source: “Press Biography,” Stephen King, 2020, accessed August 02,

2020, https://stephenking.com/press.php
REFERENCE/S
Source: “Stephen King's 'Doctor Sleep' Revisits 'The Shining' — Nearly 30 Years Later”,
AARP The Magazine, August/September 2013, accessed August 02, 2020,
https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-08-2013/stephen-king-doctor-sleep-

Source: “The Top 10 Elements of Gothic Literature,” Invaluable, October 28, 2019, accessed
August 02, 2020, https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/

PHOTOGRAPHS
Source: GoodReads, Laura Esquivel, photograph, 2020, accessed August 20,
2020, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4694.Laura_Esquivel

Source: Shane Leonard, Stephen King, photograph, 2020, accessed August 20,
2020, https://stephenking.com/press.php
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Written by: NURIZA J. SALASAIN (SST-II) DPLMHS Stand-Alone Senior High School