The Ethical in the Aesthetic/The Aesthetic in the Ethical in Literatures from the Philippines

In Philippine literary studies, the “ethical turn” interfaces with the “aesthetic turn” particularly through the ways in which Western literary genres are artfully deployed, negotiated, reinvented and even resisted in non-Western contexts. In this sense, the aesthetic turn - “the question of genre or formal convention” - is intertwined with the ethical turn, at once foregrounding the textual strategies by which the particularities of poetics are constituted and highlighting the dynamic of reciprocal constitution at the point of interface. Rather than viewed in fixed, unitary, abstract, and universalizing terms, the interface might be regarded as evocative of mobile textuality between aesthetic valuation and ethical judgments; additionally, it is characterized by textual mobility across linguistic, cultural, social and historical contexts allowing for rich hermeneutical reflexivity. This mobility at the dynamic moment of interface will be discussed in this paper, but while such interface continues to be germane in the country’s postcolonial literature, the focus will be on the earlier periods of the country’s complex colonial history.