MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES TRIPOS Part II
________________________________________________________________
Thursday 2 June 2011 1.30 to 4.30
________________________________________________________________
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
|
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 Contemporary Latin American Culture
1 ‘La novela de la dictadura se desgarra entre el juego lingüístico y el atormentado ahondamiento en lo real.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
2 ‘Works about the Latin American megacity restore visibility to the elusive weave of local, national and global processes that produce its conspicuous social inequalities.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE urban texts by different authors or filmmakers.
3 ‘The presence of irony, irreverence and intertexuality in much Latin American historical fiction demands not only that we question the narratability of the past, but also that we think the present historically.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
4 ‘Ethics and aesthetics are absolutely inseparable in these works.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE films of the post-dictatorship period in Argentina by TWO OR MORE filmmakers.
5 ‘Escritura femenina leads the patriarch to his sexual desire in order to expose him to the limit of his power.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
6 ‘Lo popular is not a referent but a relation, not significant for what it is, but for what is made of it.’ Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE writers.
7 ‘Latin American queer narratives delight in emptying out their subjects through the camp aesthetics of surface, masquerade and play; yet they also frame these empty subjects as tragic paragons of a postmodern society forged through violence.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
8 ‘Testimonio could never offer anything more than an expression of the letrado’s guilt.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
9 ‘It is too late for literature’s restitution and too early for its elimination — this is why fantasies and fears about the fall of la ciudad letrada continue to sustain Latin American writing today.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE authors.
10 ‘The critique of capitalism and globalization in recent Latin American “eco-fiction” consistently fails to provide a watertight definition of the very category, “nature”, which forms its basis.’ Discuss in relation to TWO OR MORE authors AND/OR artists.
11 ‘All Latin American detective fiction is metafiction. Herein lies its strength and its weakness as a commentary on crime and social breakdown.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts by different authors.
12 ‘Testimony in Latin American art involves curtailing conventional representation in favour of presence, performance and obliquity. In so doing it fosters participation and a challenge to official amnesia or distortion.’ Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE artists.
SECTION B
Writers, Film Directors and Artists
13 ‘Puig’s novels reproduce distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture in their tendency to transform all popular forms into the stuff of experimental literature.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
14 ‘Peri Rossi pone al descubierto el cuestionamiento del sujeto, la crisis del lenguaje y la desconfianza en las grandes narrativas para encajarse en una lucha de liberación tanto artística como social.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
15 ‘La novela no expresa a ninguna sociedad sino como negación y contrarrealidad. La literatura siempre es inactual, dice en otro lugar, a destiempo, la verdadera historia.’ Discuss TWO OR MORE texts by Ricardo Piglia in the light of this quotation.
16 ‘It is the task of unraveling the weave of language, desire and oppression that make up women’s lives that concerns Luisa Valenzuela throughout her fiction.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
17 ‘Eltit’s work reveals the tensions between the traffic of identities and the constraining effects of commodification on persons and ideas.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
18 ‘In Bolaño’s novels, the impossibility of poetry is the spur for the production of prose. But this substitution places prose under the sign of an unbearable inadequacy.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
19 ‘La literatura de César Aira es una literatura de después, cuando ya todo sucedió, todo fue dicho, todo fue leído. Por eso tiene que plantearse continuamente la pregunta: ¿cómo narrar?’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
20 ‘Las novelas de Laura Restrepo siempre vuelven al mismo tema: los repetidos encuentros y desencuentros del erotismo y de la política en los márgenes más sombríos de la historia colombiana.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
(TURN OVER
21 ‘Even if a film-maker is not conditioned by overt censorship, he is conditioned by the consuming habits of the middle classes, and this produces a cinema that is alienated and alienating.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE films by Fernando Solanas.
22 ‘The work of Doris Salcedo has explored the universal and destabilizing
power of affect (through objects and materials such as furniture, hair, concrete and animal skin) over the specificity of cultural context and symbolism.’ Discuss.
23 ‘The writing of Fernando Vallejo is caught in a deadlock between perversion and hysteria. On the one hand, it reproduces the fears that sustain public discourses in times of crisis; on the other, it bombards those same discourses with impossible questions.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.
END OF PAPER