The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism

by José García Villa, Jonathan Chua (Editor)

This is the first anthology of Villa’s essays written from the 1920s to the 1950s, which created a canon of Philippine fiction and poetry—essays counting as among the most significant in Philippine literary criticism in English.

Genres: Criticism

349 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jose Garcia Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rime scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by another poet e.e. cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a poem dedicated to Villa.

(From wikipedia.org, retrieved 14 March 2011. More info here.)

Reviews

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Villa the critic is an amateur - Villa the poet. The poet is prancing-merrily-puking; the critic is farcing, manyly flunking.

[Jean Louise]

I cannot stand Villa as a critic. Especially since I did not like him very much as a poet, and much less as a short story writer.

[justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

a white-man wannabe writer pouring his frustrations of filipino writers refusing to fester in western formalism. really enjoyed these despite