Irony and hybridity as modes of postcolonial subversion and re-writing history in Eric Gamalinda's My Sad Republic

• Main Author: Guerrero, Friena Francesca Prieto
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2001
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_honors/162
• Institution: De La Salle University

Abstract. This thesis aims to apply a postmodern perspective of history to Eric Gamalinda's novel My Sad Republic. Using the theory of Jean-Francois Lyotard's figural, Gamalinda's novel will be shown to deconstruct the colonial discourse and specifically those tools used to justify it such as Christianity, industrialism, and the American Constitution. The concepts of irony and hybridity will be shown to subvert the colonial discourse by methods by manipulating language and the claims of history and blurring the boundaries which result in the binary oppositions of which the colonial discourse is founded. The postmodern concepts of the figural and history will be appropriated towards postcolonial objectives of decolonization. The novel, the Centennial Literary Prize winner was chosen as the focus of this thesis because it is seen to be a representative of the best example of the state of Philippine literature at present and of the direction that Philippine literature may take.