modelo teste *

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Literatura dos EUA (1900-1945)

Dezembro 2012

Diana V. Almeida

1.

“Eurydice”

VI

Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;

and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell,
turn again and glance back
and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.

VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.

H.D.

Provide an analysis of this excerpt, contextualizing it in the whole poem and in the contemporary literary movements. Among other aspects, you should take into consideration the semantic fields, the symbolic elements, the identity if the speaker and the intertext evoked.

2.

Miss Eckhart, achieving silence, stood in the shadowy spot directly under the chandelier. Her feet (…) rested in the chalk circle previously marked on the floor and now, she believed, perfectly erased. One hand, with its countable little muscles so hard and ready, its stained blue nails, went to the other hand and they folded quite still, holding nothing, until they lost their force by lying on her breast and made a funny little house with peaks and gables. Standing near the piano but not near enough to help, she presided but not with her whole heart on guard against disaster; while disaster was what remained on the minds of the little girls. Starting with the youngest, she called them out.

So they played, and except Virgie, all played their worst. They shocked themselves. Parnell Moody burst into tears on schedule. But Miss Eckhart never seemed to notice or to care. How forgetful she seemed at exactly the moments she should have been agonized! You expected the whip, almost, for forgetting to repeat before the second ending, or for failing to count ten before you came around the curtain at all; and instead you received a strange smile. It was as though Miss Eckhart, at the last, were grateful to you for anything.

When Hilda Ray Bowles’ turn came and Miss Eckhart herself was to bend down and move the stool out twelve inches, she did it in a spirit of gentle, uninterrupted abstraction. She might be not moving a stool out for an overgrown girl at all, but performing some gentle ministration to someone else, someone who was not there; perhaps it was Beethoven, who wrote Hilda Ray’s piece, and perhaps not.

(…)

But recital night was Virgie’s night, whatever else it was. The time Virgie Rainey was most wonderful in her life, to Cassie, was when she came out (…) wearing a Christmas-red satin band in her hair with rosettes over the ears, held on by a new elastic across the back; she had a red sash drawn around under the arms of a starched white swiss dress. She was thirteen. She played the Fantasia on Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens, and when she finished and got up and made her bow, the red of the sash was all over the front of her waist, she was wet and stained as if she had been stabbed in the heart, and a delirious and enviable sweat ran down from her forehead and cheeks and she licked it in with her tongue.

Eudora Welty, “June Recital,” The Golden Apples

Contextualize this passage in the short story and in the whole book, taking into account, among other aspects, the importance of focalization in this story, the symbolic meaning of the recital, and the significance of the artist-characters in the overall plot.

Feel free to write in Portuguese, Spanish, French, or English.

You may consult printed and hand-written material.

The test will last 2 hours, with an extra 30 minutes.

Enjoy.