COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA

PRIMERA PRUEBA DE EVALUACIÓN A DISTANCIA

Each answer is worth 1 mark. Possible maximum marks: 10. Proportion of final total
mark: 10%.

Part One

Read the following extract carefully and then indicate whether the statements below
are true (T) or false (F).

The removal of the Author […] utterly transforms the modern text (or – which is the same
thing – the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is
absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of
as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided
into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he
exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his
work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born
simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the
writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; […]

1. The Author is believed to represent the future of his book. False

2. The modern scriptor comes into existence together with the text. True
3. There is no before/after relationship between the text and the modern scriptor. True

Part Two

Read the following definitions and match them to the correct term below.

1. A critical practice that looks for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict its
surface or apparent meaning.
Term: Poststructuralism.
2. A term which is more or less interchangeable with signified and refers to the concept to
which the signifier is related.
Term: Referent.
3. A critical practice that places literary and non-literary texts in conjunction and interprets
the former through the latter.
Term: New historicism.

Part Three

Literary text (1)

Read the following extract from Dylan Thomas’ poem “A refusal to mourn the death,
by fire, of a child in London” and then indicate the right answer to the questions
below.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

1. “her” (lines 2, 8) refers to : the riding Thames.

- Elegy of innocence and youth
- mother
- the riding Thames
- London’s daughter

2. “Robed in the long friends, /…/ the dark veins of her mother” is an extended
example of: allegory
- plot
- metaphor
- allegory
- narrative

Literary text (2)

Read the following extract from a work by Elizabeth Bishop and then indicate the
right answers to the questions below.
From our superior vantage point, we can clearly see
into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest”
of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the
camouflage “battle dress” intended for “winter warfare.”
They are in hideously contorted positions, all
dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These
ashtray uniforms were designed to be used in guerilla
warfare on the country's one snow-covered mountain
peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are
wearing them here, on the plain, gives further
proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childishness
and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable
people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of
their leaders.

1. The word in the left-hand margin, ashtray, is connected to: the sad corruption of our
leaders.
- a “nest” of soldiers
- guerilla warfare
- the sad corruption of our leaders
2. The longer text from which the above extract is taken can be described as: a
philosophical treatise
- a philosophical treatise
- a prose poem
- a short story

JOHN O’CONNOR
1º GRADO ESTUDIOS INGLESES (ELCHE)