MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES TRIPOS Part II
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SAMPLE EXAMINATION PAPER
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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
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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
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SECTION A
Topics in Latin American Culture
1 Los materiales pueden llegar de fuera, el producto final es hispanoamericano’ (José Emilio Pacheco). Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE modernista poets.
2 ‘Negrista poetry celebrates the hybridity of black popular culture and delights in sensory primitivism.’ Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE poets.
3 ‘The juxtaposition of the primitive and the modern, the colliding of worlds, and the quest for a primeval, original language can be considered clichés of vanguardist poetics.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE avant-garde poets.
4 ‘The novela de la dictadura dissects and deconstructs power while interrogating the complicities of writing and literature itself. It is markedly self-referential.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts (by different authors).
5 ‘The narrativa de la tierra, although seemingly preoccupied by the character and effects of specific physical environments and their legacies, is ultimately engaged in a form of cultural abstraction rather than description.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts (by different authors).
6 ‘One should not confuse political engagement, however revolutionary, with the implementation of a poetic manifesto.’ Discuss with reference to the work of TWO or MORE poets.
7 ‘These representations of the city reveal the always paradoxical, multilayered and differential experience of modernity in Latin America.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE urban narratives OR films OR BOTH.
9 ‘Una poesía en la que la reificación de la mujer, el empleo de la mujer como objeto del intercambio social, es condenada implicita o explícitamente.’ How applicable is this statement to the work of TWO OR MORE Latin-American women poets?
10 ‘The experimental novel tries but fails to redefine the relationship between reader and text.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE works of experimental fiction (by different authors).
11 ‘The modern short story in Latin America transforms its often elliptical plots into an absorbing, creative possibility for the reader.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections of stories by MORE THAN ONE writer.
12 ‘Identity – understood as encompassing aspects of the personal and the collective – is both questioned and asserted in post-revolution Mexican visual art.’ Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE visual artists.
13 ‘Las prácticas discursivas de las mujeres latinoamericanas subvierten tanto la temática como el enfoque masculino.’ Discuss with reference to texts by TWO OR MORE writers of fiction.
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SECTION B
Writers and artists
14 ‘Self-absorption offers a paradoxical gateway to the world in the poetry of Octavio Paz.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections.
15 ‘The carnal and the aesthetic, material indulgence and visionary transcendence are fused in a poetry which seeks to integrate the sensory and the reflective.’ Discuss this assessment of Darío’s work with reference to TWO OR MORE collections.
16 ‘Personal and cultural crisis communicated through linguistic and formal dislocation is at the heart of César Vallejo’s poetry.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections.
17 ‘The poetry of Pablo Neruda constantly renews faith in the communicability of experience and the revelatory power of the word.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE collections.
18 Write a critical commentary on the following poem. You do not need to be familiar with the work of Homero Aridjis, but if you are, you may, if you wish, compare this poem to other works by the poet.
Vientos de piedra
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Cuando el viento huía por los llanos el hombre vino y lo hizo piedra cuando el sol caía por sus rayos el hombre vino y lo hizo piedra cuando la serpiente corría por el tiempo el hombre vino y la hizo piedra capturó a la muerte con los ojos apresó a lo invisible con las manos fijó la impermanencia en una forma y en todas esas formas metió dioses
Pero el viento metido en una piedra se hundió en el polvo y en la hierba el sol del mediodía bajó a la noche y la serpiente emprendió el vuelo la muerte salió de su escultura se fue a los caminos y a los pueblos y desde entonces anda con cabeza humana El hombre fantasma de sí mismo fue demolido por sus propios dioses De todo aquello hubo lo que quedó al principio: unas piedras |
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HOMERO ARIDJIS
19 Discuss the interplay between the generative and the destructive in the poetry of Vicente Huidobro.
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20 Analyse and compare the role and treatment of nature in the work of TWO OR MORE Latin-American poets.
21 EITHER: ‘The poetry of Jorge Luis Borges has the transparency and serenity absent from his complex fictions: it is retrospective, valedictory and openly personal.’ Discuss.
OR: Discuss metafictional play and its effects in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Your answer should refer to TWO OR MORE collections.
22 ‘Rulfo makes a formal virtue of displacement, discontinuity and ellipsis even as the themes of severance and destruction provide the tragic ground of his narratives.’ Discuss.
23 ‘Carpentier’s ironic narratives reimagine the struggle for self-hood and emancipation by exploring the cultural ramifications of various kinds of misconceived, misplaced or ill-fated ideologies which shaped the historical development of Latin-American society.’ Discuss.
24 Discuss the role and treatment of violence in the work of Gabriel García Márquez.
25 ‘Cortázar’s works are heterodox, irreverent, multilayered, cerebral, self-consciously literary and yet always engaged in existential struggle.’ Discuss.
26 ‘Despite their ironic, metafictive and deconstructive verbal displays, Carlos Fuentes’s works are preoccupied with the reality of history as much as its perception or narration.’ Discuss.
27 ‘Vargas Llosa’s work has cultivated a certain duality in its pursuit of a critical voice: defiant experimentation and the periodic revisiting of realism have marked his fiction.’ Discuss.
28 ‘The narrative fiction of Rosario Castellanos is dominated by the existential and social modalities of alienation.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE works.
29 ‘Ernesto Sábato’s works explore the disturbing, shifting levels of split, conflicting and estranged psyches.’ Discuss.
30 ‘The tensions between modernity and tradition are renegotiated in the representational strategies and choice of subject matter manifested in the work of Frida Kahlo.’ Discuss.
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