The Quest for Truth: A Study of Six Contemporary Filipino Novels in English

"This book blazes a new trail in an already broken ground in Philippine literary scholarship: the scrutiny of literature with the eyes of philosophy. It seeks to examine six contemporary Filipino novels as quests for truth, fictive truth, that is, in terms of their perceived philosophies. Here, the word 'philosophy' is understood in its entire range, from the literal to the literary--as a way of seeing the world to a way of understanding it. Consequently, there are as many philosophies as there are quests of truth in as many fictive worlds presented. It is in this sense that this work is trailblazing. It suggests that in the already broken ground of the delineation of philosophy in Philippine literature, there are trails to discover in the different genres and individual works, and having struck these trails, to discern genres and individual works, and having struck these trails, to discern the direction that is intended and to name the nature of that intention. Both the depth and breadth of such a preoccupation is dramatized at once by the perceived transformation of the language of criticism employed here, from Eliot's Objective Correlative through Derrida's structuralism to the mystification of poststructuralism." -Prof. Francisco Arcellana (National Artist)