MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES TRIPOS Part II
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Wednesday 7 June 2000 9 to 12
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Paper Sp. 12
LATIN-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Answer THREE questions, including AT LEAST ONE from Section A. You may, if you wish, restrict your answers to Section A.
Candidates’ scripts as a whole must include ONE OR MORE answers that relate to poetry.
Do NOT draw substantially on the same material for more than ONE answer.
SECTION A
Topics in Latin American Culture
1 ‘The renewal of ideas and feeling in modernista poetry is reflected in a startling formal revolution.’ Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO modernista poets.
2 Discuss the notions of ‘black discourse’ and ‘black aesthetic’ with reference to the work of AT LEAST TWO negrista poets.
3 ‘Una construcción mental, un acto de creación libre de los controles impuestos por las formas tradicionales y la realidad externa.’ Discuss this description with reference EITHER to the works of creacionismo OR to other Latin American avant-garde poetry OR BOTH.
4 ‘Una cosa es poesía revolucionaria y otra muy diferente poesía de la revolución.’ In the light of this statement discuss the coexistence of political message and literary originality with reference to the work of AT LEAST TWO poets.
5 ‘In the novel of dictatorship, there is a fertile tension between the creation of a new myth of power and a critical linguistic self-consciousness which undermines any such tendency.’ Discuss.
6 Discuss the relationship in the novela de la tierra between nature and the construction of identity, both individual and national. You should refer to the works of AT LEAST TWO writers.
(TURN OVER
7 ‘Magic realism is a problematical attempt to isolate and celebrate what is authentically and distinctively Latin American.’ Discuss.
8 ‘The complexities of life in the modern Latin-American city pose a unique challenge to any coherent representation.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE writers or film directors.
9 Discuss the translation of suffering and alienation into poetry in the work of TWO OR MORE Latin-American women poets.
10 Discuss the relation between writing and reading, and between writer and reader in the experimental narratives of AT LEAST TWO writers.
11 ‘The historical novel in Latin America has been a peculiarly self-aware genre, conscious of its patterning of historical time, the ambiguous relation between literary and historical writing, its revisionism, and intertextuality.’ Discuss ONE OR MORE of the characteristics mentioned in this statement with reference to TWO OR MORE novelists.
12 Discuss and contrast the treatment of TWO OR MORE of the following in the works of TWO OR MORE short-story writers:
(i) violence; (iii) self-awareness; (v) doubling;
(ii) the fantastic; (iv) the Other; (vi) point of view.
13 ‘These films are caught between the need to expose the horror of the past and the desire for personal and collective catharsis.’ Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO Argentine films of the 1980s or 1990s.
14 ‘Because women writers cannot transparently accept the patriarchal writing traditions handed down to them, they are obliged to adopt a new and fundamentally different voice.’ Discuss with reference to texts by TWO OR MORE writers.
15 ‘The use of popular culture by Latin-American authors is complex and varied: from the denunciation of alienation and the propagation of ideology, the undoing of previous intellectual and generic hierarchies, to the celebration of the traditional and distinctive.’ Discuss with reference to the works of TWO OR MORE writers.
16 ‘The authority and legitimacy of testimonial literature is fragile, depending ambiguously on anthropological expertise, direct experience, representative individuals, and narrative realism.’ Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE works.
17 EITHER (a) ‘The visualization of autochthony in the arts was predicated on a set of negotiations: between modernity and tradition, the individual and the collective, periphery and centre.’ Discuss with reference to the works of AT LEAST TWO artists (who may include photographers).
OR (b) ‘Gender significantly determined aesthetic orientation, strategy and subject matter in Mexican art production in the first half of the twentieth century.’ Discuss with reference to the work of AT LEAST TWO visual artists.
SECTION B
Poetry and Commentary
18 Answer ONE of the following questions:
(a) Write a critical commentary on the following poem (it is not necessary for you to be familiar with other work by this poet):
Nocturno en que Nada se Oye
En medio del silencio desierto como la calle antes del crimen
sin respirar siquiera para que nadie turbe mi muerte
en esta soledad sin paredes
al tiempo que huyeron los ángulos
en la tumba del lecho dejo mi estatua sin sangre 5
para salir en un momento tan lento
en un interminable descenso
sin brazos que tender
sin brazos para alcanzar la escala que cae de un piano invisible
sin más que una mirada y una voz 10
que no recuerdan haber sido de ojos y labios
¿qué son labios? ¿qué son miradas que son labios?
y mi voz ya no es mía
dentro del agua que no moja
dentro del aire de vidrio 15
dentro del fuego lívido que corta como un grito
Y en el fuego angustioso de un espejo frente a otro
cae mi voz
y mi voz que madura
y mi voz quemadura 20
y mi bosque madura
y mi voz quema dura
como el hielo de vidrio
como el grito de hielo
aquí en el caracol de la oreja 25
el latido de un mar en que no sé nada
en el que no sé nada
porque he dejado pies y brazos en la orilla
siento caer fuera de mí la red de mis nervios
mas huye todo como el pez que se da cuenta 30
hasta siento en el pulso de mis sienes
muda telegrafía a la que nadie responde
porque el sueño y la muerte nada tienen ya que decirse
Xavier Villaurrutia
(b) ‘Perhaps the most constant feature of Paz’s work is a self-referential treatment of language and poet.’ Discuss.
(TURN OVER
(c) ‘During the period of modernismo there were significant shifts in the dominant attitudes expressed in poetry towards language and society.’ Discuss with reference to the works of TWO OR MORE writers.
(d) Discuss the changes in the poetry of Rubén Darío in TWO OR THREE of the following areas:
(i) women and sexuality; (iii) cosmopolitanism; (v) duality;
(ii) the role of the poet; (iv) society; (vi) religion.
(e) ‘The poetry of Pablo Neruda is essentially concerned with the power of the poet to control or make sense of the world, the Other.’ Discuss.
(f) ‘En toda la obra de César Vallejo hay una tensión más o menos sostenida entre por una parte el humanismo, lo confesional, cierta visión de lo real y por otra parte una negación de los sistemas discursivos convencionales, un afán por las experimentaciones difíciles o frívolas, y una fascinación con lo indecible.’ Discuss.
(g) Discuss the notions of time, identity and experience in the poetry of Borges.
(h) Examine and compare TWO OR THREE different modes in which Ernesto Cardenal approaches modernity in his poetry.
(i) ‘Lezama Lima is a deeply hermetic poet, a deft artist of complex, hidden codes.’ Discuss.
(j) Compare the visions of Latin-American identity AND/OR history in the work of AT LEAST TWO Latin-American poets.
SECTION C
Narrative
19 Answer only ONE of the following questions:
(a) ‘En la literatura de Rulfo, el individuo es impotente ante los abusos del poder y el derrumbe de la familia.’ Discuss.
(b) ‘Meaning emerges from Carpentier’s texts from a complex play between opposite or different areas of existence.’ Discuss.
(c) ‘The construction and transformation of meaning, the search for sense is shadowed in his world by the threat of loss, death, the absurd.’ Discuss this statement on the stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
(d) ‘Más que un realismo auténtico, las novelas de Mario Vargas Llosa responden a un juego constantemente renovado con los géneros literarios, la escritura y la perspectiva.’ Discuss.
(e) ‘Prodigiosa aventura textual donde las identidades personales, nacionales y familiares se forjan siempre a partir de la contradicción y la pluralidad.’ Discuss this comment on the work of Carlos Fuentes.
(f) Compare and contrast the narrative techniques used by García Márquez in TWO OR MORE works.
(g) ‘The major issues and preoccupations of Cortázar’s texts can be approached through his treatment of sexuality and love.’ Discuss.
(h) Discuss the conjunction in the novels of Manuel Puig of different genres and media.
(i) Discuss the treatment by Rosario Castellanos of the projects of liberation essayed by her characters.
(j) ‘Las obras de Isabel Allende son novelas ejemplares de afirmación femenina, estandartes de la sensibilidad de una época.’ Discuss.
(k) ‘Traba welds the personal to the political, reading collective tragedies in the minutest details of interpersonal relationships.’ Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO texts.
END OF PAPER