Modern Philippine Literature in English: Current Trends and the Tradition

Excerpt A first glance at a program in which two writers whose careers date from Commonwealth days (Bienvenido N. Santos and N. V. M. Gonzalez), one author who emerged after World War II (David K. Quemada), and one man whose career has begun in the 1970s (Tomas Santos) would lead one to expect widely-divergent views about both the past and the present occurrences in Philippine literature in English. In the present case, involving four men who are creative writers as well as critics, such an expectation did not materialize, at least not quite in the way one would likely have expected. For the most part, their analyses parted company along thematic, rather than chronological, lines, particularly in connection with such a basic problem as the clash between the ideal and the actual