[W]hat one can glean from the at once deeply personal and fully relational essays of Arguelles is a different hermeneutics. A hermeneutics not of paranoia but of reparation, not of suspicion but of enchantment.… Sa Ibang Kariktan is composed of essays on the hermeneutic experience of reading, seeing, and listening to their works that Arguelles is affected by and so admires. This is a connection unconstrained by the critical imperative of distrust of cultural production, instead sustained by what Rita Felski calls “attachment” to works of both high and popular culture, by both canonical and marginal writers. In being led by what captivates him and to what images and idiom he is attuned in both thought and feeling, this essay collection is compellingly an exercise in and even a defense of personal criticism, or autocritography.… It is a poetics of love, of writing formed by reading that is rooted in the self’s relation to an other, the work and its creator. Arguelles as reader is a cocreator of meaning, articulating the meaningfulness of the work generated by personal, national, literary, and philosophical histories and their fundamental intertextuality.
— mula sa Paunang Salita ni Antonette Talaue-Arogo

There is a lightness to the language here, allowing readers easy access to a critical consciousness that flows freely, unafraid to open up that it has been triggered by perhaps the most ordinary of things—breakfast, laughter, silence, etc. After all, even the most conceptual art is simply a distillation of the everyday, or an attempt to hazard a thought or explain an experience. Sa Ibang Kariktan shows that others too can easily find the beauty in things, and that we too can possibly write about it.
— Oliver Ortega

Author: Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
ISBN/ISSN: 9786210900736
Category: Literary Criticism/Literary Studies/Language Studies
Copyright: 2024
Pages: 174pp
Dimensions: 5.75 x 0.5 x 8 in.
Type: PB/SP