EXAMEN NORTEAMERICANA SIGLO XX

19 DE ENERO 2022 (convocatoria ordinaria)

1.Choose two essays.
1. Illusion and reality in ‘A streetcar named desire’ (by Tennessee Williams)
2. American dream in ‘Mice and men’ by (John Steinbeck) and ‘Death of salesman’ (by
Arthur Miller)
3. The treatment of death in ‘The snows of Kilimanjaro’ (Ernest Hemingway)

2. Choose 3 of the following fragments. Identify the author and text. Locate the extract
presenting the before and after and offer a close-reading analysis.
a)A water snake slipped along on the pool, its head held up like a little periscope. The
reeds jerked slightly in the current. Far off toward the highway a man shouted
something, and another man shouted back. The sycamore limbs rustled under a little
wind that died immediately. (Mice and men by John Steinbeck) CAPÍTULO 1
b)In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty
snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I
could be quiet and hate them. It would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up
and away and the sun slanting quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of damp and
rotting leaves and new earth; especially in the early spring, for it was worst then (As I
lay dying by William Faulkner) SECTION 40
c)It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year
they lived in the woodcutter’s house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half
the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter
came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and
they gave him woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted
over (The snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest HEMINGWAY)
d)Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the
events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary
they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they
absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fiztgerald) CAPÍTULO 3