Questões de Concursos Professor de Inglês

Text 7A2-I

If we believe that our own information age is defined by the digital structures of electronic communication, we must take early modern culture as inextricably bound to the medium of print. Printed text and image arose within a few years of each other in the mid-fifteenth century, credited to the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who seemingly drew together a series of extant yet disparate technologies into a new machine that could print several thousand sheets a day. The ancient oil or wine press, the goldsmith’s craft in fine metal carving, the late-medieval development of plentiful rag paper, and the recent formulation of more stable oil-based inks enabled Gutenberg’s ‘revolution’.

Similarly, early photography developed from a coming together of two otherwise disparate technologies: on the one hand, the pinhole camera through which capture a refected view of the world as an image, and on the other the chemical means to fix the effects of light exposure on paper. In both cases, these technologies shared aesthetic resources with other media available at the time, while also producing forms of representation that were uniquely theirs, and which offered access to new ways of seeing, and enabled new forms of subjectivity. The greatly expanded flow of visual information facilitated by these technological breakthroughs worked to quicken the circulation of knowledge, and the foundations of thought itself.

Genevieve Warwick and Richard Taws. After Prometheus:

Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. In:

Art History – Journal of the Association of Art Historians.

Special Edition: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. p. 201 (adapted)

Read the text II to answer the question.

TEXT II

JOHN LAURENS:

The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father

Got a lot farther by workin' a lot harder

By bein' a lot smarter

By bein' a self-starter

By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter

THOMAS JEFFERSON:

And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted

Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up

Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of

The brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow, or barter

[…]

AARON BURR:

Well, the word got around, they said, "This kid is insane, man!"

Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland

"Get your education, don't forget from whence you came, and

The world's gonna know your name! What's your name, man?"

Excerpt from the musical Hamilton, with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Text: “Why do people collect?”

Petra Engels owns 19,571 erasers, Carol Vaughn has 1,221 bars of soap, and Ralf Shrőder has a collection of 14,502 packets of sugar. Many people love to collect things, but why? Psychologists and collectors have different opinions.

The psychologist Carl Jung believed that collecting is part of our ancient human history. Thousands of years ago, humans collected nuts and berries. They kept them carefully and ate them when there was no food. The best collectors survived long cold winters or seasons without rain. Their genes passed to future generations. Nowadays, we still have a collecting instinct.

Historian Philipp Bloom has a different opinion. He thinks collectors want to make something that will remain after their death. By bringing many similar items together, the collector gains historical importance. Sometimes their collections become museums or libraries, for example, Henry Huntington, who founded a library in Los Angeles to house his collection of books.

Author Steve Roach thinks that people collect things to remember their childhood. Many children collect things, but few have enough money to buy the things they really want, and they lose interest. In later life, they remember their collections fondly. Now, they have enough money and opportunity to find special items, and they start collecting again. This way, they can re-live and enjoy their childhood years.

Art collector, Werner Muensterberger, agrees that collecting is linked to childhood. But he believes we collect in order to feel safe and secure. While babies hold blankets or toys to feel safe when their mother isn’t there, adults collect things to stop feeling lonely or anxious.

Autograph collector Mark Baker agrees that collecting is emotional, but he doesn’t collect to reduce anxiety. “For me, it’s the excitement,” he says. “I love trying to get a famous person’s autograph. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail. Also, by collecting autographs, I feel connected to famous people. I don’t just watch them on television. I actually meet them.”

These are just a few reasons for collecting. Do you know any people with collections? Why do they collect?

Questions related to the text above

Text 4

Hope is the thing with feathers

(Emily Dickinson 1830 –1886)

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

* This poem is in the public domain. Available in:< https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254>

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder às questões de 1 a 9.

Valdivia Figurines and the appeal of 'the oldest'

(1º§) The logo for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture website is about my favourite thing of the afternoon which is saying a lot since I spent much of the day reading about giant Olmec heads. Three Valdivia Figurines in the colours of the Ecuadorian flag? I am sold! Golly, I love Valdivia figurines for all the right and all the wrong reasons.

(2º§) There are two things that can easily be said about Valdivia figurines: they are VERY Ecuadorian and they are VERY looted. The first explains why they appear prominently on the Ministry of Culture website (and on stencilled graffiti around Quito circa 2007). Ancient Ecuador has played second fiddle to Ancient Peru since the early days of archaeology. The Valdivia culture, however, represents something that Peru doesn't have, 'the oldest'. Everyone loves 'the oldest', national pride, etc. etc.

(3º§) Who else loves 'the oldest'? Collectors and Museums. If the Valdivia pottery sequence is the oldest in the new world, collectors want a slice of that pie. Heck, even better than some junky pottery, the Valdivia made interesting figurines: lovely ladies that look good on stark black backgrounds in auction catalogues. They are part of 'the oldest' yet they also look good.

(4º§) Valdivia sites are famously looted and Valdivia figurines are famously faked. A few years back I started doing some initial work into looting in Ecuador (which led to fieldwork in Quito and the cloud forest that didn't really go anywhere as of yet) and I, like anyone else going down that road, came across Bruhns and Hammond's 1983 Journal of Field Archaeology piece 'A Visit to Valdivia'. Knowing nothing at all about Ecuador at the time, I had never heard of Valdivia, a wonder since the only Ecuadorian archaeology books that Cambridge owns are a few by the late Betty Meggars and Emilio Estrada from the 1950s and 1960s which link uber-ancient Ecuador to Jomon Period Japan (yeah...I know). As Bruhns and Hammond relate, Meggars detected faking at Valdivia immediately after the start of her excavations: practical jokers who discovered a market for their copies. As the market for the pieces grew, the presumed fakes get more and more elaborate and fanciful...and Valdivia sites were just looted to pieces.

(5º§) So really with Valdivia we are left with a situation where we don't know what is real. It is directly comparable to the Cycladic Figurine problem: the corpus is mostly looted, it contains tons of forms not found in the limited archaeological excavations that have been conducted, and we intellectual consumers of artefacts don't know what to believe. To me Valdivia figurines are the perfect looting Catch 22: they warrant study so that the interested public can learn about 'the oldest', but they can't be studied because collectors wanted 'the oldest' so sites were looted and buckets of fakes were produced.

(6º§) In 2007 I bought a fake Valdivia figurine in Otavalo which now stands in a Spondylus shell on my counter and watches me cook. The fella selling it to me told me it was real. I knew it wasn't but made to put it back saying something along the lines that law breaking makes me sick. He quickly agreed that it wasn't real and cut his asking price by a ton. Que Sera. Three cheers, Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture, your logo is the best.

https://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2012/09/valdivia-figurines-a

nd-appeal-of-oldest.html

Text 7A2-I

If we believe that our own information age is defined by the digital structures of electronic communication, we must take early modern culture as inextricably bound to the medium of print. Printed text and image arose within a few years of each other in the mid-fifteenth century, credited to the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who seemingly drew together a series of extant yet disparate technologies into a new machine that could print several thousand sheets a day. The ancient oil or wine press, the goldsmith’s craft in fine metal carving, the late-medieval development of plentiful rag paper, and the recent formulation of more stable oil-based inks enabled Gutenberg’s ‘revolution’.

Similarly, early photography developed from a coming together of two otherwise disparate technologies: on the one hand, the pinhole camera through which capture a refected view of the world as an image, and on the other the chemical means to fix the effects of light exposure on paper. In both cases, these technologies shared aesthetic resources with other media available at the time, while also producing forms of representation that were uniquely theirs, and which offered access to new ways of seeing, and enabled new forms of subjectivity. The greatly expanded flow of visual information facilitated by these technological breakthroughs worked to quicken the circulation of knowledge, and the foundations of thought itself.

Genevieve Warwick and Richard Taws. After Prometheus:

Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. In:

Art History – Journal of the Association of Art Historians.

Special Edition: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. p. 201 (adapted)