SP13 Examiners’ Reports
Report for June 2012
The results of the SP13 examination were particularly pleasing this year. Of 20 students who took the paper, an astonishing 60% achieved an overall mark of 70 or above (First), with the other 40% achieving a II.1. The upper quartile mark was 73.6, the median was 71.5 and the lower quartile was 67.4. These statistics suggest a very close range of marks, and indeed there was no mark of Distinction (80-85) awarded for the examination, although there was a mark of distinction amongst the Optional Dissertations for the paper.
The most popular question this year was Q1 on dictatorship texts. A good range of texts were covered, from El otoño del patriarca through Yo el Supremo, to Cola de lagartija and El recurso del método, amongst others. The best answers here showed a complex understanding of the concept of supplementarity, the elusive nature of writing, and the relation of this to power. There were some faux-pas, with more than one candidate assuming that Roa Bastos was a nasty dictator, although it should be stressed candidates were not penalized for a single such slip-up.
The next most popular answer was Q13 on Manuel Puig. Here candidates were asked to think about Puig’s play on surface and depth in the presentation of his characters, and the relationship of surface appearances to the rise of the mass media charted in his novels. Here there were some really excellent answers incorporating masquerade and drag into the play on mediatic surfaces and able to show how Puig frames psychoanalysis within putative postmodern discourses. Some less sophisticated answers reduced the “mero juego de superficies” to a concept of “superficiality”. It was not enough to do this, since it misses the more complex reading of Puig as overturning the depth/surface model.
Joint third were Q2 on urban texts (including film) and Q20 on Laura Restrepo. With Q2, all of the answers were on film. Some candidates struggled with the idea of texts introducing “noise” into the “global networks”, and a few managed to write their whole essay with no mention of the filmic use of sound. The most sophisticated answers combined some close analysis of film form (and film sound) with an understanding of films’ complicity with the very global networks which are purportedly their object of distortion.
Answers on Restrepo were generally very good, with some highly complex meditations on the way in which Restrepo’s novels complicate their own posture on forms of subaltern representation and the possibilities for a transformative political practice. The epistemology of micro-histories, together with the various forms of displacement, veiling and supplementarity at work in the texts, was often very well engaged, although there were a few candidates who clearly had not thought about the distinction between “Historia, así con mayúsculas”, and the “pequeñas y asombrosas historias”.
There were good, strong answers on the detective novel, explaining the fall of the hermeneutic detective in a wide range of contemporary texts, and on Bolaño, the latter showing some high sophistication in the use of Avelar on “mourning for the literary”, for example. Hardly any candidates were able to comment on Arendt and Eichmann, although this was not held against any candidate.
All in all, the examiners were very pleased by the evident care taken by this year’s candidates in combining close textual analysis with broader conceptual frameworks drawn both from theoretical and secondary Latin American sources, and this is reflected in the excellent overall results attained.
Report for May 2011
This year twenty-three students took the Contemporary Latin American Culture paper. Three wrote dissertations and twenty took the exam. The quality of the dissertations was very high and demonstrated a very impressive coverage of primary and secondary materials. Exam scripts also demonstrated that students had read widely and engaged well with both particular and general aspects of the course, although there was a very wide range in the quality of the scripts produced.
The most popular topics this year were: Testimonio, Historical Fiction and Puig, followed by Bolaño, the Novela de la dictadura, The City, Popular Culture and Queer Ttextualities. Students also wrote good essays on César Aira, Fernando Solanas, Post-dictatorship Argentine Cinema and there were a handful of engaging essays on Laura Restrepo, Ricardo Piglia, Doris Salcedo, Fernando Vallejo, Eco-fiction and Eltit.
Most of the essays on Testimonio were good, although there was a marked tendency towards rehashing the debates surrounding the genre. The best essays mentioned the desire sustaining the genre, the fetishisation of otherness, and the problematic place of the genre within a context in which the hegemony of literary studies has been seriously challenged. As usual, the best essays also made sure not to focus exclusively on the debates surrounding the genre, and demonstrated good detailed knowledge of a range of works.
Essays on Historical Fiction were well written, although there was, again, a marked tendency to recycle standard points about the subversion of grand narratives, the interruption of linear historical time, and the rise of the simulacrum. More disappointingly, very few students indeed succeeded in addressing the ways in which these features demand that we rethink the present historically, as required by the question.
Essays on Puig demonstrated that students had engaged with a wide range of his texts. Again, examiners found that students stuck to rather standard accounts of the interplay between forms and the levelling of hierarchies between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ culture, and that very few of the essays showed evidence of any engagement with Puig’s experimentalism.
Essays on the city were good and covered abroad range of films (mainly from Colombia and Mexico), although there were some rather lazy formulations about commoditization, consumerism and capitalism, with the terms at times being used as if thery were interchangeable. As is the case every year, the best essays struck a fine balance between close analysis of camerawork, mise-en-scène, editing and sound, and more general (theoretical) analysis of filmic narratives.
Some of the essays on Bolaño showed flair and found ways to integrate standard points about the complicity of literature and evil into a discussion of poetry and its fortunes within his oeuvre. Yet there was surprisingly little engagement with recent work published on the author. One or two scripts did, nonetheless, try and shoehorn a discussion of the fortunes of poetry into a discussion of the post-dictatorship.
Essays on the ‘queer’ writings of Lemebel and Vallejo contested the moralism of Sontag in her writings on ‘camp’, and engaged with theoretical work on masquerade and performativity; however, little was said about the contrast between tragedy and farce.
Essays on Solanas gave good general coverage of the filmmaker’s preoccupations, but curiously had problems with the terms ‘alienating’ and ‘alienated’. While students noted the parallels with Brechtian theatre, surprisingly nothing was said about the links between alienation and ‘defamiliarization’ (both conjoined in Brecht’s term Verfremdungseffekt). Very little was said, either, about the middle-class genesis of much revolutionary thinking at the time. Furthermore, the strategy of simply opposing the relevance of the question tended to fall flat here, as the question was a quotation from the director himself.
Essays on Salcedo tended simply to restate the tension between the artist’s universalist idiom and its context-specific genesis; they also fought shy of answering the implied question on the universal communicability of certain forms of affect. There was, nonetheless, an impressive engagement with use of different materials.
Future students should be reminded that while sophisticated engagement with theoretical discourses is to be encouraged, this should not be a substitute for close textual and visual analyses.
