MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES TRIPOS Part II
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Wednesday 27 May 2009 1.30 to 4.30
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Paper Sp. 13
CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE
Answer THREE questions, AT LEAST ONE from each section. ONE OR MORE answers must contain substantial discussion of literature.
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 Contemporary Latin American Culture
Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE authors/directors/artists.
1 ‘The novela de la dictadura founds its critique of power on the ambiguities of subjectivity, signification and authority as they are articulated in language.’
2 ‘The city can no longer be read as a macrocosm of national life, but has become a microcosm of the more inscrutable yet ineluctable powers of globalization.’
3 ‘Contemporary Latin American historical fiction takes as its starting point the destabilization of history as a conceptual entity; yet it does so, paradoxically, only to reassert the importance of history.’
4 ‘El cine argentino de la pos-dictadura sigue insistiendo en que no puede haber ni denuncia del pasado ni resistencia contra el presente sin un cuestionamiento previo de los modos de representación.’
5 ‘Escritura femenina combines linguistic play with naïve political optimism.’
6 ‘Rather than offering an escape from the tedium of everyday modern life, literary engagements with contemporary forms of popular culture alert us to the inescapable entanglement of subjectivity, desire, capital and power.’
7 ‘Queer fiction in Latin America is closely aligned with narratives of resistance, and moves between the bedroom and the barricades with surprising ease.’
8 ‘Despite its stated interest in representation – in collective representativity and historical truthfulness – the testimonio shows a more profound fixation with what is exceptional and marvellous.’
9 ‘Far from representing a moral enterprise, literature now seems inextricable from the mundane, the murderous and the monstrous.’ Discuss in a context referred to as the decline and fall of the lettered city.
10 ‘Depth and authenticity give way to surface and play in today’s representations of landscape and autochthony.’
11 ‘Today, the reality of radical urban insecurity has disabled the conventional function of the detective: that of moral mediation of crime.’
12 ‘Contemporary multimedia art in Latin America reconfigures memory and questions testimonial practices by exploring interrelated notions.’
SECTION B
Writers and Artists
Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE works.
13 ‘To seduce, narrate, and sell: these are the three faces of Puig.’
14 ‘The performativity of gender is balanced, in Peri Rossi’s work, by a careful exploration of the operations of power in and through language.’
15 ‘Yo discutiría el concepto de la metaficción, no el concepto de metacrítica, porque me parece que la ficción es siempre metaficción’ (Ricardo Piglia).
16 ‘Pienso que un libro es como un Gólem, que yace inánime hasta que la lectora lo infunda con vida propia’ (Luisa Valenzuela). Taking the Golem to be a mythical animated being created from inanimate matter, discuss EITHER Valenzuela’s use of monsters and legends in her writing OR the role assigned to processes of reading and writing in her work OR BOTH.
17 ‘Diamela Eltit relates issues of gender and performance to the crisis of the authoritarian gaze.’
18 ‘Bolaño busca una incorporación de lo político tanto en la literatura realista como en la literatura fantástica.’
19 ‘César Aira explores and subverts the structures of apprehension central to all interpretative experience. All autonomous characters are found to be part of a pair; all originality is inscribed within the logic of the copy.’
20 ‘Laura Restrepo’s work constitutes an extended meditation on the problematic nature of any effort to represent the Other.’
21 ‘The films of Pino Solanas represent an uneasy fusion of Brechtian estrangement and straightforward political denunciation.’
22 ‘Doris Salcedo’s problematic work seeks to challenge repressed histories and neglected witnesses through allusive forms and unconventional materials rather than explicit exposure and commemoration. Her work is interested in generating presence rather than image.’
23 ‘Río de doble corriente, la obra de Fernando Vallejo fluye por un lado hacia la verdad, lo real, lo autobiográfico, y por el otro hacia la ficción, el simulacro, la nada.’
END OF PAPER