MODERN  AND  MEDIEVAL  LANGUAGES  TRIPOS    Part II

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            Monday 6 June 2011     1.30 to 4.30

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            Paper Sp. 12

            LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE

Answer THREE questions, AT LEAST ONE from each section.  ONE OR MORE answers must contain substantial discussion of poetry.

Candidates for this paper may NOT draw substantially on material from their dissertations or material which they have used or intend to use in another scheduled paper.  Candidates may NOT draw substantially on the same material in more than one question on the same paper.

STATIONERY REQUIREMENTS

20 Page Answer Book x 1

Rough work pad

            Tags

You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent pages of this question paper until instructed that you may do so by the Invigilator

SECTION A

Topics in Latin American Culture

1          ‘Modernista poetry is characterized by cosmopolitanism and obsession with verbal elegance and musicality.’  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE modernista poets.

2          ‘In poesía negrista, musicality, sensuality and often humour are used to explore and explode racial stereotyping.’  Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE poets.

3          ‘Avant-garde poetry is marked by a crisis in mimesis, the autonomy of signs from their referents, techniques of deformation and carnivalization.’  Discuss with reference to the work of any TWO OR MORE avant-garde poets.

4          ‘In the narrativa de la tierra, meaning always exceeds or escapes from the shackles of the ideology and allegory which have been seen to limit it.’  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE authors.

5          ‘En la poesía política la voz personal del poeta y su retórica literaria buscan fundirse con la del otro: el pueblo oprimido, las víctimas de la guerra.’  Discuss the applicability of this statement to the work of any TWO OR MORE poets.

6          ‘En la ciudad el individuo está inserto en complejas redes de poder y discursos simbólicos, en relaciones económicas y familiares.’  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE urban narratives OR films OR BOTH.

7          ‘La lengua es un órgano de conocimiento / del fracaso de todo poema / castrado por su propia lengua.’ In the light of these lines by Alejandra Pizarnik discuss the treatment of language and discourse in the work of any TWO OR MORE Latin American women poets.

8          ‘The Latin American experimental novel often depends on the tension between clear, bold structure and fragmentation, ambiguity, paradox and unknowability.’  Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE writers.

9          ‘El cuento no declara: interroga, inquieta, sugiere, subvierte.’  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections of stories by MORE THAN ONE writer.

10        ‘At its best, Latin American female writing is antihegemonic and challenges a monumentalizing or totalizing view of literature.  It is therefore multiply voiced and tends to operate within a field of sinuous and shifting positionalities rather than from a single fixed position.’  Discuss with reference to texts by TWO OR MORE women writers.

11        ‘The subversive, transformative power of the fantastic and the irrational is made apparent in non-realist visual production in Latin America.’ Discuss with detailed reference to the work of TWO OR MORE Latin American artists/ photographers.

12        ‘The construction of visual identities in post-Revolutionary Mexican art sought to reconcile aesthetic experimentation with a preoccupation with socio-cultural change, national history, popular myths and vernacular traditions.’  Discuss with reference to the works of TWO OR MORE visual artists.

            SECTION B

Writers and Artists

13        ‘La obra de Rulfo cuenta la trágica disolución de una sociedad con una visión mítica y a la vez sociológicamente determinada.’  Discuss.

14        ‘Para Borges, las estructuras humanas son ficciones; manejadas por él, estas ficciones generan múltiples y fantásticas verdades literarias y existenciales.’  Discuss with reference to the writing of Borges.

15        ‘La dialéctica espacial, temporal, cultural y racial de las novelas de Alejo Carpentier apunta a una identidad ya trágica, ya barroca, pero siempre rica y matizada.’ Discuss.

16        ‘García Márquez’s work is always constructed between an unresolved relationship between the local and the universal, the political and the existential, the literary world and the external world, the magical and the real.’  Discuss.

17        ‘Julio Cortázar’s works are haunted by an otherness, a dimension which would redeem, or perhaps disintegrate the everyday.’  Discuss.

18        ‘Los juegos estructurales y literarios de Carlos Fuentes ponen de relieve la extraordinaria complejidad de lo real.’  Discuss.

19        ‘The literary sophistication and self-consciousness of Vargas Llosa’s novels sharpen and enrich his fundamental realism.’  Discuss.

20        ‘Cronista lúcida y dolida de un mundo de explotados.’  Discuss this definition of Castellanos with reference to TWO OR MORE of her prose works.

21        ‘While the literary world of Ernesto Sábato is marked by uncontrollable violence, incipient madness and fascination with the irrational, it also explores notions of freedom, evil, and rebellion against the dehumanizing abstraction of social norms.’  Discuss.

22        ‘En la poesía de Octavio Paz, la nostalgia de la unidad habita los inseparables terrenos de lo erótico, la escritura y la experiencia existencial.’   Discuss.

(TURN OVER

23        ‘Vallejo maltrata el lenguaje y las cosas de los hombres para hacer visibles su realidad vital y una entrañable y solidaria humanidad.’  Discuss.

24        ‘A través de la obra de Neruda, y a pesar de prácticas retóricas muy dispares, la figura del poeta es central y relativamente estable.’  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections of his poetry.

25        ‘Esta vasta alusión literaria no es erudita sino un modo de vivir la cultura que cabe llamar moderno, libérrimo, capaz de desplazar, por placer e ironía, las fuentes y los monumentos de sus estatutos de autoridad.’  Discuss this assessment of Darío’s work, or parts of it, with reference to TWO OR MORE collections.

26        ‘No acepto vuestras sillas de seguridades cómodas / Soy el ángel salvaje que cayó una mañana / En vuestras plantaciones de conceptos / Poeta / Antipoeta / Culto / Anticulto.’  Discuss the work of Vicente Huidobro in the light of these lines from his Altazor.

27        ‘The work of Frida Kahlo negotiates the pictorial relation between self and

other and self as other.’  Discuss with detailed reference to the works of Frida Kahlo.

28        Write a critical commentary on the following poem:

Claro de luna Con la extática elevación de un alma, la luna en lo más alto de un cielo tibio y leve forma la cima de la calma y eterniza el casto silencio de su nieve. Sobre el páramo de los techos se eriza una gata oscura; el olor de los helechos tiene una farmacéutica dulzura. Junto a una inmóvil canoa que al largo del parque cuenta íntimas vejeces, una rana croa como un isócrono cascanueces, y una guitarra yace olvidada en la proa. Blanqueando vecindades halagüeñas en témpanos de cales inmaculadas, parecen lunares peñas las casas aisladas. La medianoche, con suave mutismo, clava a las horas el fondo de su abismo. Y anunciando con sonora antonomasia el plenilunio a su inmóvil serrallo, un telepático gallo saluda al sol antípoda del Asia. .... En el agua oscura sobre la cual desfloca el sauce ribereño su cabellera agravada de sueño como un sorbete se deslíe una oca. Diluye un remo de líquido diptongo, el lago tiembla en argentino engarce, y una humedad de hongo por el ambiente  se esparce.

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                                                                                    Leopoldo Lugones

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