The Smile Revolution of the late eighteenth-century France had proved a false dawn — or a damp squib. It would not be until the twentieth century that the smile made what has proved to be a spectacular comeback. This was initially a slow process, but the twentieth-century Smile Revolution was complete by the middle decades of the century. As with its predecessor in the eighteenth century, it was a complex phenomenon which involved social and cultural as well as scientific and technological changes. France was not in the vanguard of change as it had been earlier. Now, particularly in the later stages, the USA led the way.

The virtual prohibition on the use of the white-tooth smile in western portraiture had been ended by Madame Vigée Le Brun in 1787. The smile did thereafter feature in portraits, as we have suggested, but it was still very much a minority taste. And it remained very heavily gendered. Women might occasionally be shown with white-tooth smiles, but this was invariably seen as an unbecoming gesture for males. In France, no artistic movement embraced white teeth as wholeheartedly as, for example, the Pre-Raphaelites in England. Oddly, the artistic movements which did highlight the open mouth in their art, following the wake of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), were the expressionists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. For them, the open mouth and the display of teeth were more likely to be linked to the grimace, the Democritan smile of mockery, or the gaping Gothic hole.

Taken overall, the upshot of Le Brun’s work was to endorse de convention that, in Western art, if one wanted to be portrayed pleasantly smiling (as opposed to laughing), then it was best to smile like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Her smile — which, though admired, was not in fact a great favourite in Elightenment France — had been gracious, genteel, controlled and mild. The Mona Lisa was not alone in smiling, but she was also best minded to keep her mouth firmly shut. For individuals to have their mouths open in a painting in Western art, back to Antiquity, generally signified that, if they were not in the grip of extreme passion, they were plebeian or insane. The dark, forbidding facial orifices of beggars, gypsies, strolling players, and other social marginal portrayed by Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, Velazquez, and others fitfully generate a sense of menace.

England’s Queen Victoria was famously “not amused”, and her official portraits are certainly very glum. In fact, in 1843, she commissioned the German court artist Franz-Xavier Winterhalter to paint an intimate portrait of her to present as a special gift to her new husband, Prince Albert. She chose to be represented in reclining fashion, smiling charmingly, and displaying her teeth. This probably makes her the first European monarch to wear the Vigée Le Brun smile in a portrait. Yet the circumstances of the commission were significant. Victoria made the painting a personal gift to Albert, and hung it in their private suite. It was never seen publicly in her lifetime.

Only right at the very end of the nineteenth century were teeth and smiles timidly finding their way more evidently into painted portraits. Interestingly, it seems to have been female artists, such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, who gave lead to this. The pace of change was initially slower in regard to photographic portraiture. Strangely, perhaps, given the new medium’s more naturalistic, even documentary potential, white teeth failed to establish themselves in photography in the nineteenth century. There were technical reasons for this. For all the nineteenth century, and especially during the early days, posing times were long (thirty minutes at first). In the 1860s and 1870s, sitters frequently wore neck-braces, arm-bands, and waist-restrainers to ensure stillness. Even when the exposure time was reduced to a minute or less, this still removed the possibility of anything like instantaneousness or spontaneity in capturing identities. The possibility of a wide smile morphing into a smirk or a rictus was still present.

In the event, the emergence of new cultural models was needed to stimulate change. In the eighteenth century, the cult of sensibility had acted as a trigger: people wanted to cry and smile like their novelistic heroes and heroines. In the early twentieth century, new media took this path-breaking emulative role. Of prime importance was film and the associated medium of studio photography. More even than novels, film encouraged processes of identification with the lifestyle and self-presentation of celebrity of fantasy figures. Before the First World War, film studios in Hollywood started to make the posed images of their stars into media outputs with mass appeal. The smile was gradually becoming a key feature of this new medium.

Where film-stars led the way, private individuals followed, particularly in the inter-war period. Even some politicians began to go with the flow. By the beginning of the Second World War, the practice of saying “cheese” in front of a camera had begun. The display of teeth in photography was becoming the norm for those who watched films as much as for those who starred in them.

The triumph of the twentieth-century Smile Revolution stimulated a postmodernist response in the early 1960s to the emergent Smile Revolution. Andy Warhol’s ironically flat depiction in 1962 of thirty-two Campbell’s soup cans satirized art practice and taste as much as it did the mindless replicability of advertising images. Warhol added an extra twist in his Marilyn Monroe diptych, also in 1962. A witty commentary on the times, the work highlighted how the smile of this highly individualistic and charismatic film star was just as replicable as a can soup. (943 words)

Jones, C. (2017). The Smile Revolution in eighteenth-century Paris. Oxford University Press, with adaptations.

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A tarefa do resumo trouxe, como em anos anteriores, um texto de tipologia argumentativa. Apesar de não ser um texto muito longo, o texto pode ter apresentado dificuldade de compreensão e de reescritura para os candidatos, por se tratar de um texto sobre história sociocultural da perspectiva das artes.

“Having lost the opportunity opened at the creation of the United Nations, Brazil’s aspiration to become a Security Council permanent member remained to a great extent dormant. The option left in 1945 had been to be elected by the General Assembly as a nonpermanent member. Brazil has done so for several terms since 1946, with the important exception of a gap of almost two decades, from 1969 to 1987, when the country shied away from the Council.”

Garcia, E. V.; Coelho, N. B. R. (2018) A Seat at the Top? A Historical Appraisal of Brazil’s Case for the UN Security Council. SAGE Open, 1-13, with adaptations.

Considering each administration in Brazil between the period of 1992 and 2019, discuss Brazil’s attitude, approach and drive in search of a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. And, based on that historical background, briefly give your opinion on what Brazil’s future behavior could be, bearing in mind the recent confirmation of its seat on the council for the period of 2022-2023.

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A tarefa da redação trouxe um texto motivador curto e bastante claro. Por outro lado, o comando da questão era extenso e demandava que o candidato fizesse tanto uma avaliação histórica quanto projeções para o futuro. É uma tarefa complexa para ser desenvolvida entre 45-50 linhas e em tempo adequado. E, assim como em anos anteriors, é uma tarefa que exigia dos candidatos muito *specific content knowledge* e muita destreza no planejamento argumentativo.

A fala da língua

As técnicas modernas de mapeamento genético permitiram quantificar o que está à vista de todos. Enquanto nos Estados Unidos apenas 1% da população banca possui alguma ascendência africana, no Brasil a maioria dos brancos — cerca de 60% — pertence a linhagens africanas ou ameríndias em matéria de ascendência materna. O entrelaço genético se reflete no modo como os brasileiros se autoclassificar quando instados a declarar a cor de sua pele: de galega a sarará e de meio preta a cor de canela e puxa para branca, o léxico cromático se ramifica em vasta e anárquica teia de designações.

A linguagem do povo não é apenas um instrumento de comunicação na vida prática: ela incorpora elementos simbólicos e figurativos da cultura e traz inscrita em si mesma um modo particular de pensar e sentir. Há uma forma de vida embutida em nossa língua falada — a língua fala. Daí que, enquanto a presença de termos e expressões afro-indígenas no inglês norte-americano é rarefeita (ainda que não nula), ela transparece de forma ubíqua no português do Brasil. A permeabilidade da cultura luso-brasileira às culturas de raiz africana e ameríndia traduz-se em nossa fala comum e, como revela com exuberância de achados e exemplos o antropólogo baiano Antonio Risério, as áreas de maior influência linguística são justamente aquelas em que a presença afro-indígena passou a integrar o DNA da nossa cultura: a erótica-afetiva; a moral e os costumes; a culinária; música e dança, sem falar, é claro, no vasto domínio dos termos botânicos, zoológicos e toponímicos onde a presença do tupi é proeminente. A mistura das línguas do povo “inventa-línguas” é a mistura dos genes por outros meios. “O que quer, o que pode esta língua?” (288 words)

GIANETTI, Eduardo. Trópicos Utópicos: uma perspectiva brasileira da crise civilizatória. 1a. ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016, com adaptações.

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A texto da tarefa da versão este ano foi extremamente longo, mais longo até que em 2019 (246 palavras na ocasião). Assim como nos últimos cinco anos pelo menos, é um texto que fala sobre o Brasil (desta vez, cultura e língua). A tarefa exigia do candidato, como sempre, competência tradutória muito bem desenvolvida, testada em termos de subcompetência bilíngue, subcompetência extralinguística, subcompetência de conhecimentos de tradução e, sobretudo, subcompetência estratégica.

Any exchange of views about the underlying philosophy, structure, or operation of international relations begins with the concept of sovereignty. Viewed as “supreme authority”, it is the operational base of both international and domestic political life, although with quite opposite effects on the two realms. Ever since it surfaced as the bedrock organizational tenet of world politics in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it is, and has always been, a somewhat controversial foundation for world affairs. Dissension has surrounded matters such as the location of sovereignty and the extent of power that it conveys to its possessors, and concepts have evolved over time. Disagreements over sovereignty are conspicuous features of some debates about the evolving international order and the assault on its basic function is part and parcel of international conferring.

Seventeenth century nations witnessed the wresting of political power from the church and the attendant bestowal of this very power on secular authorities. This transfer was accompanied by the effective installation of sovereignty as the basis of relations among secular political communities. An ultimate outcome of this “marriage” was the association of sovereignty with territorial political jurisdictions. Mirroring the political period in which this concept became the bellwether of an evolving secular state-based system, sovereignty began as a principle that legitimized and promoted authoritarian rule. That principle was challenged with the rise of democratic thought, suggesting that sovereignty was a trait not only of the ruler but the ruled as well. From this challenge sprang the modern notion of popular sovereignty. (254 words)

Snow, D. M. (2019) Cases in International Relations – Principles and Applications. (8^th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 3-4, with adaptations.

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A tarefa da tradução este ano foi um texto bastante longo, assim como em 2019. Apesar de não ter sido um texto literário, como em 2019, o texto trazia diversos problemas de tradução, principalmente em termos de equivalências no nível das palavras e acima do nível das palavras.