JESCL Volume 22 (2024-2025) This volume of JESCL will be available for viewing on June 12, 2026
Introduction
This issue is a snapshot of an English department in flux. Like most educators, our faculty are teaching in new circumstances, learning to work online and offline, both inside and beyond our classrooms. We are reimagining our graduate programs, restructuring our committees, and exploring synergies between the curricular areas of Language, Literature, and Creative Writing.
My Country’s Chains
Others is what we call those who fall outside the majority. The majority has been concentrated into a choking urban setting. Setting aside the casket, fans, card-games to raise funds, snacks of crackers and coffee, there is also the continuity of grief. Grief is not an animal.
When You Love, Paper Burns
The pain was love, / that to receive love was to be pained.
The Country Poem (in which lines can be read in any order)
If you had seen her on the street, you would have wanted to shield her from smoke and rain. / The community has to imagine itself more intensely.
The Tragedy of the Pineapple
When others demand Pinya/ I imagine the shape of someone’s arms / wrapped around a body shivering
Notes like Footsteps
I’d been playing for years, so the flute was a familiar weight in my hands, and my fingers could find their way around the keys easily, but the cold metal of the lip plate pressed to my bottom lip still felt oddly impersonal. It hadn’t always been this way.
Ecophobia and Errancy in the Epic: Ecocritical Reading of the Panay Sugidanon
The Sugidanon, or the epic tradition in Panay, is a rich source of material that allows us to see and understand how the experiences of the folk are inscribed in literature and how such literary forms can be reflective of the folk’s consciousness, specifically in terms of how it sees itself in relation not only to other humans, but to the natural world at large.
Urban “Apparitions” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The London Scene
London features prominently in Virginia Woolf’s works; among them Mrs. Dalloway and a collection of essays called The London Scene. The location not only serves as a backdrop for Woolf’s narratives, but also provides insights into women’s lives in relation to urban space in the early twentieth century.
Reimagining the Law: An Inquiry into Poetic Form
Poems about the law belie the claim that poetry and law are incompatible fields. Poets who write about the law have critiqued it, insisting that it ought to serve more than just the personal interests of lawyers and judges, as well as the interests of only the rich and powerful. This insistence, however, has not translated into new ways of imagining the law particularly in Philippine Anglophone literature.
Longhand 