Questões de Concurso sobre Literatura

At the age of forty, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis invented a narrative device that transformed him from a provincial, rather conventional writer into a world-class novelist. This leap is usually explained biographically, and psychologically. Critics like to say that Machado, who nearly went blind, lost his illusions and passed from romanticism to realism — and so on. Explanations of this sort, however, are beside the point, since anyone can contract an illness, shed illusions or accept a new literary doctrine without becoming a great writer. But if we consider the change as one of literary form, the terms of the argument alter. Machado’s innovation then appears as an aesthetic solution to objective problems, lodged not simply within his own earlier fiction, but in the development of the Brazilian novel and indeed of Brazilian culture at large: perhaps even of ex-colonial societies in general.

In 1880 Machado published The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the first world-class Brazilian novel. What had changed with this novel? Its stroke of genius was to move the narrative point of view to the upper-class position. Hitherto, the narrators in Machado’s novels had always sympathized with those in a precarious, socially dependent situation, fretting over the arbitrary and unreliable behaviour of those who called the shots, as if to ask how such dependents could persuade their overlords to behave in a civilized manner, to make society more just and liveable for all. In other words, Machado’s unreliable narrator has a distinctly nineteenth-century class substance, and as a device this is its secret.

SCHWARZ, R. A Brazilian Breakthrough. In: New Left Review. 36, nov./dec., 2005. p. 91- 107 (adapted).

O texto apresenta um elemento inovador fundamental da ficção de Machado de Assis, que refere-se ao (à)

It is time now to return to the “literature” in “comparative literature” and to examine its position, which we believe vital, in the new digital context, which has become the context of all cultural production today. The fact that any form of production whatsoever is now impacted and transformed by the digital turn in culture, however, does not imply that literature and the book have become residual domains of culture, whose dominant and emergent forms (to follow here the terminology coined by Raymond Williams 1977) would then be digital and multimedia.

One may have the impression that literature is now evolving towards new forms of transmedia storytelling. True, this is a decisive turn or shift in contemporary writing. However, it would be dangerous to conclude that this evolution is linear or teleological. In this case, there is no reason at all to think that the literature of tomorrow will become transmedia storytelling, with only a marginal place left for what used to be considered literature and its traditional mediations. Even Henry Jenkins made it clear from the beginning that “not all stories will flow across media”, right after pointing to Hollywood´s pitches as the referential scenario against which transmedial storytelling’s focus on characters and worlds must be understood.

BAETENS, J.; SÁNCHEZ-MESA, D. Comparative Literature in the Age of Convergence Culture. Interfaces. 36, 2015 (adapted).

O texto apresentado faz uma reflexão sobre o lugar da literatura nos dias atuais, apontando para a

Which expression is usually used to tell stories in English?

The plot of pure and tragic love of Shakespeare’s first great tragedy is known all over the world. This work is called

A Christmas Carol (1843) is the story of a bad character who improves his behaviour after a ghost tells him how he will die. It was written by

The famous poem, The Raven (1845), depicts an unhappy young man who asks if he will again meet his dead loved one, Lenore. “Nevermore!” is the repeated, machine-like answer of the big black bird. This poem was written by

According to Kumaravadivelu (2001), “The postmethod learner is an autonomous learner. The literature on learner autonomy has so far provided two interrelated aspects of autonomy: academic autonomy and social autonomy”. Choose the alternative that corresponds to the author’s idea of autonomy:

______, play by the Irish poet and writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), was first staged in London in 1895.

It is possible to affirm that text A

Nobel Prize of Literature in 1954, American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), published in 1940 a novel with the Spanish Civil War as its background. This work was called

Since Shakespeare and Dickens are “literary”, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl can be classified as

Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, was sister to Charlotte and Anne Brontë, both also writers. Charlotte (1816-1855) was the first to achieve public recognition, publishing under the pen name “Currer Bell” a novel called

Member of the Bloomsbury Group, this author and publisher is today regarded as one of the most important modernist literary figures of the last century.

Read these very famous passages below.

poor educational standards and training programs put in danger the advantage over competitors.

Text for items from 111 through 120.

1 Around the world the public sector is under siege: taxpayers

everywhere want better, cheaper government. The message is simple:

tinkering with the system is not good enough. What’s needed is a

4 complete reinvention of government.

Since the federal government initiated the National

Performance Review in 1993, by most accounts progress has been

7 uneven in the implementation of the approaches developed.

The report notes that public confidence in the federal

government has never been lower. The average citizen believes 48 cents

10 of every tax dollar are wasted. Five of every six strongly want

“fundamental change”. Only 20% of the people trust the federal

government to do the right thing most of the time — down from 76 per

13 cent thirty years ago. The national debt now exceeds $ 4 trillion —

$ 16,600 for every man, woman, and child.

There is enormous unseen waste. The Audit Department has

16 found that the Defense Department owns more than $ 40 billion in

unnecessary supplies. The Internal Revenue Service struggles to collect

billions of unpaid bills. A century after industry replaced farming as the

19 country’s principal source of wealth creation, the Agriculture

Department still operates more than 12,000 field service offices, an

average of nearly four for every county in the nation — rural, urban, or

22 suburban.

But the report goes farther:

And yet, waste is not the only problem. The federal government

25 is not simply broke; it is broken. Ineffective regulation of the financial

industry brought us the Savings and Loan debacle. Ineffective education

and training programs jeopardize our competitive edge. Ineffective

28 welfare and housing programs undermine our families and cities.

The conclusion was that the US is suffering the deepest crisis

of faith in government in memory. In past crises, people doubted their

31 leaders on moral grounds. They felt their government was deceiving

them or failing to represent values. Today’s crisis is different: people

simply feel the government doesn’t work.

Don Tapscott. The digital economy: promise & peril in the age of networked intelligence (adapted).

poor educational standards and training programs put in danger the advantage over competitors.