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This paper aims to look on how the Great Tagalog Poet Francisco Balagtas influenced some of the poems included in Sa Gulugod ng Kalabaw: Mga Tula ng Bulacan, 1928-1997. Using textual analysis, the study examined the poems if they follow the traditional Tagalog poetry formalized by Balagtas in his Florante at Laura. Aside from the aesthetical standards laid out by Bienvenido Lumbera in his Formalization of Tradition (1967), the formalistic lens in Virgilio Almario's Taludtod at Talinghaga (1991) was also used in reading and analyzing the poems. In addition, some poems that directly mentioned Balagtas were also explored to see how they reflect the influence of the Tagalog poet in the farmers' imagining of an ideal Filipino society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) has been much blamed for characterising modernist literature by an aesthetic refusal to engage with society, and for encouraging the narrow formalism of New Critical pedagogy. The recovery of Wilson's own distinctive teaching practice, however, shows that he used the book to teach modernism's development out of coterie symbolism towards social engagement and cultural criticism. Modern literature classrooms like Wilson's functioned not to define literature's purity, but to explore the connections between then-contemporary modernism and all kinds of writing that describes, references, and names the material world in which it was created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the divide between American formalism and theoreticians of minimalism, Barnett Newman's art received great acclaim from both schools of thought. Attempting to unearth the philosophical preconditions of this strange constellation, this article argues that the closeness between minimalism and formalism is due to their mutual reliance upon phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. However, their proximity also conveys their distance, since they imply different interpretations and applications of the philosophical schools in question. Such theoretical differences shed light on Newman's paintings: both minimalism and formalism are right in their accounts - yet not exclusively so. What arguably makes up the distinctive fascination of Newman's paintings is their incessant oscillation between empty physicality and powerful meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Richard Murphy's memoirs, The Kick (2002. London: Granta) and his poem 'Wittgenstein and the birds', from his Collected poems 1952-2000 (2001. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, p. 6) to try to define his particular approach to life writing, which I believe to be significantly different in its constructive premises from that of most other memoir-writers and autobiographers. That is, if most writers of memoirs check the events which they are narrating against their memories, 'notoriously fallible and open to schematization', as Jerome Bruner notes in Narrative and identity (2001. Selfmaking and world-making. eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh, 25-38. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, p. 28), or against the memories of family members and friends, Murphy draws on his contemporary notebooks, meticulously maintained over many years. Through this memorial and writerly resource he exerts his control over his material, a control always judiciously employed, in keeping with a partiality for what I call 'classical formalism' in his poetry. Memoir writing and poetry, in this respect, share in source material which, considering the initial care Murphy took in writing up his notebooks, impacts on present technical realization in an inherently aesthetic manner. The article concludes by considering the writerly and psychological implications of this control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]