Portuguese Language and Brazilian Literature
Language core
Candidates must command normative grammar (crase, regência verbal e nominal, concordância, colocação pronominal) and text interpretation. The trap in CACD-style items is confusing regência with colocação: e.g., "assistir ao filme" (preposition required) versus "assistir o doente" (transitive direct, meaning to help). Another recurring trap is crase before place names and before possessive pronouns, and the distinction between "há" (past) and "a" (future distance).
Literary periods
Know the arc: Quinhentismo (informative/Jesuit texts), Barroco (Gregório de Matos, conflito entre corpo e alma), Arcadismo (bucolismo, carpe diem, Cláudio Manuel da Costa), Romantismo (three generations: indianista, ultrarromântico, condoreiro), Realismo/Naturalismo (Machado de Assis's irony; Aluísio Azevedo's determinism), Parnasianismo, Simbolismo, Pré-Modernismo (Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto), Modernismo 1922 (Macunaíma, Semana de Arte Moderna), and post-1945 (João Cabral, Clarice Lispector, Guimarães Rosa).
Traps
Questions often ask you to attribute a feature to the wrong author or to conflate Realismo and Naturalismo. Machado is Realist (psychological irony, social critique); Naturalism stresses biological determinism and milieu.
Worked example
If a passage shows a narrator who mocks a character's vanity with ironic asides and refuses moral judgment, the answer is Realismo machadiano, not Naturalismo, because there is no determinism and no scientific framing.
Rule of thumb
For each author, memorize one work plus one defining feature; that triad (author–work–feature) answers most attribution items.