Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale
CAPES EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
CAFEP EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
SESSION 2006
ÉPREUVE EN LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE
Consigne
Dans le cadre de votre épreuve, vous procéderez :
- à la présentation, à l’étude, à la mise en relation des trois documents proposés
(A, B et C, non hiérarchisés)
(en anglais)
- à l’explication des trois faits de langue soulignés dans un document et repérés dans
la marge*
(en français)
- à la restitution du document sonore que le jury vous proposera
(en français)
Document A
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (London : Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 18-21.
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“When I see blood, I become a bull”. Marvin Hagler.
I have no difficulty justifying boxing as a sport because I have never thought of it as a
sport.
There is nothing fundamentally playful about it; nothing that seems to belong to daylight,
to pleasure. At its moments of greatest intensity it seems to contain so complete and so
powerful an image of life – life’s beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often selfdestructive courage – that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game. During a superior boxing
match (Ali-Frazier I, for instance) we are deeply moved by the body’s communion with itself
by way of another’s intransigent flesh. The body’s dialogue with its shadow-self – or Death.
Baseball, football, basketball – these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably
sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn’t play boxing.
Observing team sports, teams of adult men, one sees how men are children in the most
felicitous sense of the word. But boxing in its elemental ferocity cannot be assimilated into
childhood. (Though very young men box, even professionally, and many world champions
began boxing in their early or mid-teens. By the time he was sixteen Jack Dempsey, rootless
and adrift in the West, was fighting for small sums of money in unrefereed saloon fights in
which – in the natural course of things – he might have been killed.) Spectators at public
games derive much of their pleasure from reliving the communal emotions of childhood but
spectators at boxing matches relive the murderous infancy of the race. Hence the occasional
savagery of boxing crowds – the crowd, largely Hispanic, that cheered as the Welshman
Johnny Owens was pounded into insensibility by the Mexican bantamweight champion Lupe
Pintor, for instance – and the excitement when a man begins to seriously bleed.
Marvellous Marvin Hagler, speaking of blood, is speaking, of course, of his own.
Considered in the abstract the boxing ring is an altar of sorts, one of those legendary
spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended: inside the ropes, during an officially
regulated three-minute round, a man may be killed at his opponent’s hands but he cannot be
legally murdered. Boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilization; or, to use D. H.
Lawrence’s phrase, before God was love. If it suggests a savage ceremony or a rite of
atonement it also suggests the futility of such gestures. For what possible atonement is the
fight waged if it must shortly be waged again… and again? The boxing match is the very
image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind’s collective aggression; its
ongoing historical madness.
Document B
F. X. Toole, Million Dollar Baby (London : Vintage, 2005), pp. 74-75.
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“Here’s my deal,” said Frankie. “You do what I say. I don’t do what you say”.
“I do.”
“I show you moves and you can’t do them that’s okay. But I give you moves you can do
but don’t want to do, that ain’t okay.”
“I do.”
“You don’t like workin with me, quit me at any time, no hard feelins,” he went on. “I
don’t like workin with you, I quit you anytime no hard feelins.”
“I do.”
So it began, Frankie stripping her down to the bare wood. She worked so hard he wished
his boys worked the same way. He tested her power and stamina by taking her round after
round on the punch mitts. He went with her to make sure she ran right. He taught her the
correct stance, how to keep her legs under her the width of her shoulders, instead of spread
wide and dug in.
“Why?”
“Balance – with balance you’re free, and because your reach is longer when your legs are
under you than spread wide apart.” He proved it to her.
He showed her how to move in and out, and side to side. He taught her how to fight
backing up. For her legs, he randomly tossed the punch mitts to the canvas one at a time and
had her scramble to pick them up. She lasted a minute before her legs gave out the first day.
In two weeks she was going three 3-minute rounds and learned how to use her thighs, glutes,
and leg biceps the way fighters use them.
He taught her how to stay on the balls of her feet, how to generate momentum off her right
toe; how to keep her weight over her left knee, to flex on it when she fired her jab; how to
double up and triple the jab, which would keep the opponent backing up on her heels. He
taught her how to cut off the ring, how to slip punches and counter off lefts and rights. No
matter how hard he drove her, she was always ready for more. His heart went out to her,
macushla – mo cuishle in Gaelic: darling, my blood.
“You got a bad habit of dropping your left hand, like so,” he told her. “Joe Louis had that
problem, even though he had won twenty-seven fights in a row, twenty-three by knockouts.
That was before Max Schmeling came over on top of Louis’s lazy left and knocked Joe out.”
“Louis beat him in the second fight.”
“Yeah, but they’re one and one in the record book,” Frankie said. “It’s okay if you’re
baitin someone, gettin her to throw a lead right so you can slip or counter – it’s okay because
you’re ready for the froggy to jump. Sugar Ray Robinson would do it, then he’d take a short
step back and yop!, fire a good-night hook. But you ain’t there yet.”
“Protect myself at all times.”
“It’s a rule.”
He had her spar with the other girls in the gym. As he suspected, she held her breath under
pressure and got tired. So he taught her how to breathe. Breathing correctly allowed her to
shoot quicker shots at will, and she whacked the punch mitts relentlessly. When he had her
spar with the girls again, she ran them out of the ring.
“How’m I doin, boss?”
“Better.”
“I’m down to one-thirty.”
Just right, Frankie thought, tall and rangy for her weight, with reach and power. He smiled
to himself as he turned away – and she’s getting so slick she can fight in the rain and not get
wet.
Document C
Thomas Hoepker : Mohammed Ali, Chicago River 1966
Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale
CAPES EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
CAFEP EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
SESSION 2006
ÉPREUVE EN LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE
Consigne
Dans le cadre de votre épreuve, vous procéderez :
- à la présentation, à l’étude, à la mise en relation des trois documents proposés
(A, B et C, non hiérarchisés)
(en anglais)
- à l’explication des trois faits de langue soulignés dans un document et repérés
dans la marge*
(en français)
- à la restitution du document sonore que le jury vous proposera
(en français)
DOCUMENT A
Edward HOPPER, Room in Brooklyn 1932
DOCUMENT B
DOCUMENT C
Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale
CAPES EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
CAFEP EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
SESSION 2006
ÉPREUVE EN LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE
Consigne
Dans le cadre de votre épreuve, vous procéderez :
- à la présentation, à l’étude, à la mise en relation des trois documents proposés
(A, B et C, non hiérarchisés)
(en anglais)
- à l’explication des trois faits de langue soulignés dans un document et repérés
dans la marge*
(en français)
- à la restitution du document sonore que le jury vous proposera
(en français)
Document C
Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale
CAPES EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
CAFEP EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
SESSION 2006
ÉPREUVE EN LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE
Consigne
Dans le cadre de votre épreuve, vous procéderez :
- à la présentation, à l’étude, à la mise en relation des trois documents proposés
(A, B et C, non hiérarchisés)
(en anglais)
- à l’explication des trois faits de langue soulignés dans un document et repérés
dans la marge*
(en français)
- à la restitution du document sonore que le jury vous proposera
(en français)
DOCUMENT A
The scene takes place in an Asian family living in the suburbs of London in the 1970's. The narrator, who is halfIndian, half-British, is a relative who has been invited there with Helen, his British-born girlfriend.
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It was hell on earth at first, the party, with everyone awkward and self-conscious. In the silence,
Uncle Anwar, Oscar Wilde himself, made three attempts to jump-start the conversation, all attempts
stalling. I examined the threadbare carpet. Even Helen, who looked around at everything with great
sympathetic curiosity and could usually be relied upon for cheer and irritating opinion, said nothing but
'yum-yum' twice and looked out of the window.
Changez and Jamila sat apart, and although I tried to catch them looking at each other, I can
guarantee that not a single surrepticious glance was exchanged by the future bed-mates. What would
Changez make of his wife when he finally looked at her? The days of tight tops and mini-skirts for women
were gone. Jamila was wearing what looked like several sacks: long skirts, perhaps three, one over the
other, and a long smock in faded green beneath which the flat arcs of her braless breasts were visible to
the slightly interested. She had on her usual pair of National Health glasses, and on her feet a rather
unrelenting pair of Dr Martens in brown, which gave the impression that she was about to take up hillwalking. She was crazy about these clothes, delighted to have found an outfit she could wear everyday,
wanting, like a Chinese peasant, never to have to think about what to put on. A simple idea like this, so
typical of Jamila, who had little physical vanity, did seem eccentric to other people, and certainly made
me laugh. The one person it didn't seem eccentric to, because he didn't notice it, was her father. He really
knew little about Jamila. If someone had asked him who she voted for, what the names of her women
friends were, what she liked in life, he couldn't have answered. It was as if, in some strange way, it was
beneath his dignity to take an interest in her. He didn't see her. There were just certain ways in
which this woman, who was his daughter, had to behave.
Eventually, four relatives of Anwar's turned up with more drink and food, and gifts of cloth and
pots. One of the men gave Jamila a wig; there was a sandalwood garland for Changez. Soon the room was
noisy and busy and animated.
Anwar was getting to know Changez. He didn't seem in the least displeased with him, and smiled
and nodded and touched him constantly. Some time passed before Anwar noticed that his muchanticipated son-in-law wasn't the rippling physical specimen he'd expected. They weren't speaking
English, so I didn't know exactly what was said, but Anwar, after a glance, followed by a concerned closer
study, followed by a little step to one side for a better angle, pointed anxiously at Changez's arm.
Changez waggled the hand a bit, and laughed without self-consciousness; Anwar tried to laugh
too. Changez's left arm was withered in some way, and stuck on the end of the attenuated limb was a lump
of hard flesh the size of a golf ball, a small fist, with only a tiny thumb projecting from the solid mass
where there should have been nimble, shop-painting, box-carrying fingers. It looked as if Changez had
stuck his hand into a fire and had had flesh, bone, and sinew melted together. Though I knew a remarkable
plumber with only a stump for a hand who worked for Uncle Ted, I couldn't see Changez decorating
Anwar's shop with one arm. In fact, had he four Mohammed Ali's arms I doubted if he'd know what to do
with a paintbrush, or with a toothbrush for that matter.
If Anwar now perhaps had reason for entertaining minor reservations about Changez (though
Changez seemed delighted by Anwar, and laughed at everything he said even when it was serious), this
could be nothing compared to Jamila's antipathy. Did Changez have an idea of the reluctance with which
his bride-to-be, now moving across to her bookshelf, picking up a book by Kate Millett, staring into it for
a few minutes and replacing it after a reproachful and pitying glance from her mother, would be
exchanging vows with him?
Jamila had phoned me the day after Helen and I fucked in Anerley Park to tell me of her decision.
That morning I was so ecstatic about my triumph in seducing the dog-owner's daughter that I'd completely
forgotten about Jamila's big decision. She sounded distant and cold as she told me she would marry the
man her father had selected from millions, and that was the end of it. She would survive, she said. Not one
more word on the subject would she tolerate.
The Buddha of Suburbia,(1990) by Hanif Kureishi. Part I : In the Suburbs, chapter 6.
DOCUMENT B
YOUNG, BUSY ASIAN LOOKING FOR LOVE? YOUR THREE-MINUTE DATE STARTS NOW
Even parents approve as tradition gives way, reports PATRICK BARKHAM
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IT COULD be an Asian parent's worst nightmare: sons and daughters flirting with 30 members of
the opposite sex for three minutes each in a dimly lit bar serving alcohol.
But it is often with the blessing of their families that thousands of British Asians are discarding
traditional ways of meeting a partner and attending speed-dating nights across the country. The latest
dating phenomenon is a radical departure from the traditional way that British Muslims and Hindus meet
their partners.
Being forced into an arranged marriage may be a thing of the past for most young British Asians,
but many still go through the complex Rishta process, dating a potential husband or wife recommended by
their family or "aunty-ji" - a community figure respected for her judgment and match-making ability.
Young Asians are finding speed-dating the perfect way to meet potential partners from the same
religious and ethnic background and to take control of the process themselves. Far from enraging their
parents, many are chivvied by their families into attending the events. Mothers and fathers see the nights
as the perfect way to speed the marriage process for professional sons and daughters, who fob off talk of
matrimony by telling their parents that they are too busy with their careers to find a partner.
Rakesh, from Leicester, met Sonia, his girlfriend of six months, at an event organised by
AsianSpeedD8 in London." My parents have been encouraging me to go on these things," he said." They
feel that at an age of 25 I should have a plan to marry by my late 20s. Speed-dating is an extension of what
is happening already at weddings and community functions where you've got a mother or aunt trying to
set you up with someone behind the scenes". Rani, 24, from London, is going to her first Hindu speeddating event in a Central London bar on Monday after finding it hard to meet other Hindus in her work as
a conference organiser for secondary school teachers. I've done my degree and I've got a job and the next
stage is supposed to be getting married,"she said. "Whenever I go to family events all I get is people
asking ' When are you going to get married? 'You get a lot of pressure from your family, but people my
age want to meet someone ourselves. My parents have been trying to make me go speed-dating for ages.
They've also tried to introduce me to people through friends and I'm not too keen on that. I've said I want
to meet people myself and my parents have said 'well, you're not meeting anyone at the moment, so why
don't you go?' "
AsianSpeedD8 is the brainchild of Ashok Gupta, 28, a stress manager, and his business partner,
Maha Khan, 24, a barrister. They started the nights last year because so many of their young professional
Asian friends were struggling to find potential partners. More than 4,000 young Muslim and Hindu Asians
attended events in London, Birmingham and Manchester. Mr Gupta and Ms Khan now organise five
nights a month. There are plans for more in Leeds and Leicester.
"I was a single British Asian not meeting many Asians and I thought that speed-dating was
designed for people like me," Mr Gupta said. "After we organised the first event, the whole thing went
crazy. "The pair say that they are working with tradition; speed-dating complements, rather than replaces,
the collective wisdom and judgment of aunty-ji. " There is nothing wrong with Rishta, but sometimes
there is a lot of pressure to make your mind up quickly," Mr Gupta said.
“You may have to decide if they are your partner for life in a couple of months. Through the
Rishta system, the family and culture demand that you tick all the boxes: Hindu, professional and from a
good family. Increasingly, British Asians want to tick the box marked 'compatibility'." Ms Khan said that,
as a Muslim woman, she was worried about the Muslim community's reaction but felt that their special
speed-dating nights fulfilled Islamic criteria." Our events are open and we are the chaperones," she said.
Crucially, the events offer non-dating tickets so that participants can bring a relative as a
chaperone. One nervous Muslim girl even took her mother along.
The separate nights for Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are all held in venues selling alcohol. Costing
£20 for daters, the nights begin with a comedian to lighten the mood. Parents or chaperones can buy nondating tickets for £12.50.
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Participants meet up to 30 potential partners for three minutes and tick them on a memo-card if
they would like to see them again. Participants can check on a website within an hour to see if the people
they ticked also want to meet them. They can then get in touch via e-mail. Mr Gupta said :"There is
always alcohol. We leave it to individual choice. If they meet someone and they are having a drink they
can choose not to tick that box if they want to."
There are sceptics within Asian dating organisations. Parag Bhargava is co-owner of Suman
Marriage Bureau International, the oldest Asian introductions agency in Britain, which has helped to
arrange 7,000 marriages in 32 years. He said: " Speed-dating is not really the way for Asian partners to be
sought in the current day and age. Issues overlooked by speed-dating are the question of caste, which
many people still have concerns about, and the issue of family background. Second and third-generation
Asians are a little bit more relaxed about caste, but often still look at the same caste out of respect for their
families."
The Times, Saturday January 17, 2004. p11
DOCUMENT C
"He was having the time of his life... Until his father started picking out his wife ",
EAST IS EAST (1999), directed by Damien O'Donnell .
http://www.ukquad.com/eastiseast.JPG
Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale
CAPES EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
CAFEP EXTERNE D’ANGLAIS
SESSION 2006
ÉPREUVE EN LANGUE ÉTRANGÈRE
Consigne
Dans le cadre de votre épreuve, vous procéderez :
- à la présentation, à l’étude, à la mise en relation des trois documents proposés
(A, B et C, non hiérarchisés)
(en anglais)
- à l’explication des trois faits de langue soulignés dans un document et repérés
dans la marge*
(en français)
- à la restitution du document sonore que le jury vous proposera
(en français)
DOCUMENT A
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
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Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each breast.
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For Lady you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful glew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell. London:
Longman, 2003. Pp. 81-84.
DOCUMENT B
Gerard Seghers
Repentant Magdalen, c. 1630
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?70353+0+0
DOCUMENT C
The Sunday Times - Review
March 13, 2005
I'm going to live forever
Some scientists predict that today's children will be able to live for more than 1,000
years. Is immortality just around the corner? Bryan Appleyard peers into a hairraising future without death
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De Grey is a brilliant, self-taught gerontologist at Cambridge. He is a 41-year-old
cyclist with a 2ft beard, enormous whiskers and a rapid, high-pitched voice that on
first contact is frankly terrifying.
He is in excellent health. He knows this because he has had one of the most rigorous
medicals in the world at Kronos, an anti-ageing research institute in Phoenix,
Arizona. But, in case it all goes wrong and he dies, he has arranged for his head to
be frozen and stored by the Alcor cryonics facility in nearby Scottsdale. It will be
revived when the technology becomes available so that de Grey can go on talking.
He is generally regarded as the leading theorist of anti-ageing technologies or, as he
calls them, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is convinced the
first thousand-year-old human has already been born. (...)
The central conceptual element in this approach is that the human body is a machine
which can be fixed. This was not, until recently, widely accepted. Either the body was
not viewed as a machine or it was seen as a particular type of machine that was
programmed to fail. The physicist Geoffrey West, for example, calculates that 120 is
the maximum age for a human being by comparing us with other creatures. Biological
systems simply cannot sustain themselves beyond a certain point.
But then along comes Tom Kirkwood, professor of medicine at Newcastle University
and a Reith lecturer. Kirkwood produced the “disposable soma” theory. As far as the
genes are concerned, our sole function is to reproduce. Our bodies put so much
energy into this that, once our reproductive years are behind us, there is nothing left
to keep us going.
The genes that specify maintenance functions — DNA repair, antioxidant enzymes,
stress proteins — weaken in their effects. Disease finally strikes us down. The soma
— the body — is disposable. But the point is we do not die, we are killed.
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“There is no in principle reason why we should die,” says John Harris, professor of
bioethics at Manchester University. “Tom Kirkwood was largely responsible for
changing our view that ageing and dying were programmed into us as part of the
evolutionary process.”
As Kirkwood puts it: “Maximum lifespan is not clock-driven but malleable, eg through
modifying exposure to damage or enhancing somatic maintenance functions.” The
body, in short, can be fixed.
The idea is, in medical terms, revolutionary; in social, political, psychological,
philosophical, economic and even aesthetic terms it is earth-shaking, transformative,
unimaginable in its implications. In a nutshell, it signals the end of the human.
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Death has always defined us. The first creatures to laugh, said Vladimir Nabokov,
were also the first creatures that knew they were to die. Self-awareness means,
above all, awareness of one’s own ultimate extinction. But, as La Rochefoucauld
pointed out in the 17th century, looking directly at death is like staring at the sun. It
cannot be done.
And so conscious creatures have always embarked on elaborate programmes of
death denial or death justification. Even the Neanderthals decorated their graves and
positioned the corpses as if for another life. The great religions promised immortality
in another realm or as part of the great wheel of existence. In fact, as the philosopher
Roger Scruton has pointed out, all human civilisation might be defined as an attempt
to give meaning to death.
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In our day, civilisation might be defined not as giving meaning to death but as a
desperate attempt to defer it. Staying young is our religion, and every health,
cosmetic or diet fad offers just that. The rise of individual, as opposed to collective
thinking, has inspired the conviction that the extinction of the individual is the only
conceivable evil.
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Furthermore, science has relativised death. Death used to be defined as the moment
the heartbeat and breathing stopped. But then it was found that people could be
revived from this condition, so the concept of brain-stem death was introduced. Now
even this turns out to have uncertainties. Death, apparently, is no more than the
moment when current medical competencies expire. Perhaps, in fact, death is
optional.
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But if we don’t die, what are we? Not human. Thinkers like Francis Fukuyama have
argued that the destruction of human nature would be a catastrophe. Medical
interventions aimed at immortality are, therefore, a potential source of evil. Others,
like John Harris, argue that there is nothing so great about being human.
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“I don’t think it’s important to be human. I have no attachment to my species
membership. We know we’re descended from a small number of apes. If they’d got
together and decided not to evolve into us, we’d not be here talking about this.
There’s no reason why we should not evolve into something else.” (...)
We will no longer be foolish mortals, but wise immortals.We will no longer be human,
we will have become the gods we have aspired to be ever since 1609 when Galileo
proved the church’s astronomy wrong and human reason right. Only accidents — the
falling piano, the hurtling asteroid — will remain to thwart our pretensions.
Welcome to immortality, the last consumer good, available soon at your local pharmacy.
Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard, March 13, 2005