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Texto 1
REVERBERATING SONG IN SHAKESPEARE AND MILTON
One of Shakespeare’s most perceptive readers, Milton famously described the playwright as “sweetest
Shakespeare, fancy’s child / Warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild.” These lines have suggested to a
number of readers that Milton viewed his predecessor not only as a writer of “natural” facility, but also
as a poet of wide-ranging—and possibly undisciplined—imagination, or fancy. Fancies, or fantasies,
however, are also a particular type of music: a music without words. I argue that Milton’s account of
Shakespeare’s warbled notes suggests that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and
obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean. This reaction to Shakespeare,
while scarcely complete—and perhaps a touch condescending—nevertheless indicates a profound
insight into the affective workings of Shakespearean drama. Milton’s condescension only half-conceals
his own desire to emulate this Shakespearean approach to poetry, despite his deep misgivings about
such a project. Obsessed as he was with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his
own, including his father’s profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject
Shakespeare’s particular form of musical poetics in his own quest to “join the angel choir.”
My title, Reverberating Song, reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the
story that I tell. These include the acoustic and affective properties of music, as infectious sounds that
linger in the air and in the memory; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of
celestial harmonies; and one writer’s allusions to another. All these meanings intersect with another
kind of reverberation suggested by the title, if only through a false etymology: an echo as a translation
of sound into the verbal medium of language. While a number of early modern English poets and
dramatists, including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, use and represent music in
complicated ways, drawing attention to its mingled dangers and attractions, they do not display a
similar interest in the ability of music—heard, imagined, or remembered—to infiltrate language. Both
Shakespeare and Milton repeatedly suggest that music possesses the disturbing and exhilarating
capacity to spread beyond its boundaries, to reverberate throughout the larger structure of the narrative
or dramatic text. Consequently, even their descriptions of music are less like set-pieces or fixed
pictures than like a dye soaking through cloth, or a disturbance in water. These musical representations
do not point solely towards some real or fictive music outside the text, but towards something that
potentially inheres within the text itself, or begins to inhere as soon as it is described. Milton’s verse
self-consciously strives for such effects, while in Shakespeare’s plays, the agency is considerably less
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clear: music seems to creep into language of its own volition, beyond the awareness or desire of the
speaker.
I argue that Shakespeare and Milton reproduce not the specific formal or sonic properties of music, but
its effects. Their understanding of these effects was determined by history and culture as well as
individual sensibility. Indeed, their historical context gave particular urgency to the attempt to emulate
music, an art which was viewed, paradoxically, both as the ordering principle of the world and as a
chaotic force undermining meaning. Shakespeare and Milton wrote during a time of transition, when
the ancient Pythagorean conception of the universe, with its harmoniously ordered spheres and its
concordant microcosms and macrocosms, contended with new theories about the nature of sound and
the structure of the world. Early modern complaints about music’s unintelligibility and sensuality drew
upon a tradition of criticism familiar since late antiquity, but the Reformation had raised anxiety about
the effects of music to a new level of intensity, and humanism placed increasing importance upon the
need for music to serve as handmaiden to words.
Fonte: Adaptado de Erin Minear. Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical
Representation. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011.
RESPONDA ÀS QUESTÕES CONFORME INFORMAÇÕES CONTIDAS NOS TEXTOS.
QUESTÃO 1
De acordo com o autor, a visão de Milton sobre a musicalidade de Shakespeare é
(A) complacente.
(B) completa.
(C) indisciplinada.
(D) obscura.
QUESTÃO 2
As três ocorrências do possessivo his em negrito no primeiro parágrafo referem-se,
respectivamente, a
(A) Milton, Milton e Shakespeare.
(B) Milton, Shakespeare e Shakespeare.
(C) Shakespeare, Milton e Milton.
(D) Shakespeare, Shakespeare e Milton.
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QUESTÃO 3
Explique como o autor justifica a escolha do título Reverberating Song.
O autor entende que a reverberação mencionada no título diz respeito aos múltiplos e sobrepostos
significados do vocábulo, seja em relação às propriedades acústicas e afetivas da música ou à falsa
etimologia do termo, que remete à transliteração do som em comunicação verbal.
QUESTÃO 4
De que formas os escritores Spenser, Jonson e Marston diferem de Shakespeare e Milton no
tocante à maneira de representar a música?
Spenser, Jonson e Marston representaram a música de maneira complexa, se concentrando em
descrever seus perigos e atrações, sem demonstrar interesse no poder que a música tem de se
infiltrar na língua. Shakespeare e Milton ressaltaram a capacidade da música de ir além de seus
limites, reverberando através da estrutura do texto narrativo ou dramático.
QUESTÃO 5
Shakespeare e Milton, em sua compreensão sobre os efeitos da música, foram influenciados pelos
seguintes fatores, EXCETO:
(A) cenário cultural.
(B) contexto histórico.
(C) crenças religiosas.
(D) percepção individual.
Texto 2
ANALYSING CONVERSATION IN FICTION: AN EXAMPLE FROM JOYCE’S PORTRAIT
In this chapter I propose to demonstrate some of the ways in which the theories and principles
developed by linguists and conversational analysts for the systematic study of discourse and natural
conversation may be applied illuminatedly in the stylistic and structural study of a fictional
conversation within a literary text (the Christmas dinner scene in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man). I acknowledge at the outset that natural and fictional conversation differ in many ways.
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It is not merely that in fiction the talk is ‘tidied up’, that there are relatively few unclear utterances,
overlaps, false starts, hesitations, and repetitions: there are also literary conventions at work governing
the fictional representations of talk, so that the rendered text is quite other than a faithful transcription
of a natural conversation. However, certain structural and functional principles govern fictional
dialogue, as they do natural dialogue, and in the former case as in the latter any witness (a reader or
hearer) must recognize and attend to those principles in order to comprehend the dialogue.
A reader’s initial reaction to the early conversation might well be to note the conventionality of the
early talk, evidenced by the stretches of phatic communion, the politeness phenomena and various
ritualized utterances, such as the sequence of formal invitations to the guests from Mr Dedalus to come
and sit at the table and Stephen’s recitation of the grace. The conventionality of much of this early talk
should not blind us to its functionality in establishing greater speaking and acting rights for Mr Dedalus
in relation to the other diners. Mr Dedalus is head of the house and head of the table, dispenser of
drinks, turkey and sauce, the provider, and their talk gives him ample opportunity to establish his roles
not merely as master of ceremonies but in addition as master of the talk. Dante, as we shall see, overtly
challenges the latter role, and is even notably negative in her compliance with Mr Dedalus adopting the
former role: she answers his first question to her with a frowning ‘No’ and rejects his belated offer of
sauce.
The earliest stage of the confrontation is marked by what I shall call conversational turbulence. The
turbulence is due not merely to the open and divisive clash of views about politics-in-religion but also
to the latent dispute or negotiation over quite what the topic of contentious talk should be. Christmas
Day falls in the shadow of Parnell’s recent death, and it seems that the men— Dedalus and Casey—
wish to talk specifically of Parnell when denouncing Church interference in politics, while Dante does
not wish to talk about Parnell particularly, unless driven to it, but does wish to defend the Catholic
Church. Note that in this initial dispute there is no specific mention of Parnell, and the disagreement is
over generalized principles, more abstract and less ‘engaged’ than it will be later—all of which is
reflected in the swapping of generic sentences, the debating-contest style:
We go to the house of God…to pray and not to hear election addresses.
They [the priests] must direct their flocks.
I have already said something about power relations between speakers in the scene. Nominally at one
extreme, with no speaking rights, is Stephen. While Mr Dedalus occupies the dominant position in the
party, and is thus likely to enjoy superior speaking rights, note that Dante has the relatively lowly status
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of the dependent female relative, the maiden aunt, and so may be assumed to have lesser speaking
rights here. In addition, as a respectable middle-class woman in that society at that time, she is also
constrained by tacit rules as to the language she may use and the topics she may discuss (one
consequence is that she probably receives the men’s vulgarities of language and topic as—calculated or
inadvertent?—insults). But from a socio-cultural perspective there is an unexpected vehemence in
much of Dante’s talk, an unexpected frequency in the number of conversational turns she takes and a
noticeable refusal to suffer the men’s options in silence. Her views may be unattractively puritanical,
naively submissive to the authority of the Church, but her behaviour within this scene is one of
Stephen’s earliest witnessings of the diabolical message of liberation, non serviam (I will not serve).
And that breaking of the social rules on her part is no doubt partial explanation for the vigour and
violence of the men’s responses, what seems to be their ‘ganging-up’ on Dante: her behaviour is an
incitement.
Fonte: Adaptado de Michael Toolan. Analysing Conversation in Fiction: an Example form Joyce’s Portrait, in Language Discourse and
Literature. London: Routledge, 1995.
QUESTÃO 6
Segundo o autor, o ponto em comum entre o diálogo ficcional e o natural é que ambos
(A) dependem das intenções do leitor/ouvinte.
(B) estão repletos de hesitações e repetições.
(C) se caracterizam pela falta de clareza.
(D) seguem princípios estruturais e funcionais.
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QUESTÃO 7
As expressões em negrito no primeiro parágrafo “in the former case” e “in the latter” referem-se,
respectivamente a
(A) convenções literárias e representações da fala.
(B) diálogo ficcional e diálogo natural.
(C) leitor e ouvinte.
(D) princípios estruturais e princípios funcionais.
QUESTÃO 8
De que maneiras o papel assumido pelo Sr. Dedalus no romance Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man se manifesta no diálogo ficcional?
O papel do Sr. Dedalus como chefe da casa e mestre de cerimônias se evidencia no diálogo ficcional
por meio da convencionalidade dos diálogos, presentes na comunhão fática, nas manifestações de
cortesia e nas diversas falas ritualizadas. Essas estratégias funcionam no sentido de estabelecer para
o Sr. Dedalus os seus direitos de fala e de ação em relação aos demais convidados presentes.
QUESTÃO 9
Segundo o autor, como a existência de uma ‘turbulência conversacional’ pode ser comprovada no
romance Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
A turbulência conversacional está presente no conflito de opiniões sobre a relação entre política e
religião e na disputa para se definir qual exatamente será o foco desse diálogo conflituoso.
QUESTÃO 10
A veemência da personagem Dante é considerada surpreendente pelo fato de ela ser
(A) casada.
(B) mulher.
(C) religiosa.
(D) rica.
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