Mood of Metaphor: Tropicality and Time in the Philippine Poetic

Abstract

When the trope is exhilarated and enervated by a milieu, which in this case is tropical, the category of mood must be apprehended as a theoretical opportunity where a phenomenology of the time that it takes for the imagination to work through the limits of the earth could be delineated. What is at the heart of this undertaking is to draw the history and theory of metaphor in the Philippines nearer to its original point of reference--nativity, where time is posited as self-generative in its commencement, but also potentially moving towards the modern, in spite of this anterior existence. The Introduction nominates the figure of homo tropicus, who shall hold the theory of the trope between the traumauturgy of ecstasy and the thaumaturgy of agony. Chapter One derives from the tropicality of grammatical mood a vernacular tropology that dwells on metaphor as both predicament and possibility, arising from a thought-edifice and moving into ideative choreography. Chapter Two examines the folk verse/song as a form of gift-exchange between the worldly subject and the earthly domicile. Chapter Three looks at the metaphor of metamorphosis in the metrical romances Ibong Adarna and Bernardo Carpio in order to look at how imperial forms breed certain alterities to be represented as otherworldly in order for colonial language and anti-colonial eloquence to be fantasized as possible and historic. Chapter Four is an analysis of the offspring of modernism and tropicality that could be born and raised, by inhabiting the aesthetic temperaments of the tropical modernist poet Virginia R. Moreno. The Conclusion contends what the dissertation offers as promising in terms of contemporary tropography and postcolonial poetics.