M.A. Comprehensive Exam
Format
The M.A. Comprehensive is a written exam required of all MA students and is designed to test your critical skills and your knowledge of literary history, literary theory, and rhetoric. It is given each semester in two parts (usually on the first two Saturdays in November and on the first two Saturdays in April after spring break for three hours each). Part I covers British and American literature from Classical to late Eighteenth Century. Part II covers British, American and World literature from late Eighteenth Century (Romantics) to late Twentieth Century. Questions on the exams expect that you have knowledge of and can discuss Criticism and Literary Theory also.
Coverage & Exam Questions
Examiners will assume that you have read all the works on the M.A. Reading List (see below), and they will frame questions accordingly. But you will not be limited to discussing only works on this list when you answer the questions. Sample examinations are here .Read through the Guidelines below and print a copy of the Worksheet to keep track of your progress. This Worksheet will be submitted to the MA Advisor prior to each exam. For exam dates, see the current Graduate Newsletter .
Studying for the Exam
The Reading List, you should note, represents a minimal catalogue of the works an English M.A. should know, and the program assumes you will do a considerable amount of reading in addition to your course assignments. Seminars, for the same reason, are not designed necessarily to cover the titles on the list; they are designed rather to model various ways of reading literature and to equip you to understand and evaluate critical approaches. You are expected to apply these approaches as you study the works on the list and to demonstrate on the Comprehensive Examination that you are capable of the level of independent study expected of a Master of Arts in English.
Guidelines
--> Exam Guidelines Worksheet in DOC and PDF
1) Formulate an individual reading plan, using the MA Reading List (below), choosing texts from each period, and consulting with Graduate faculty and the MA Coordinator, as needed. Familiarize yourself with the canonical literary periods and texts by reading an overview - for example, from a traditional anthology of literature, a glossary of literary terms, or other works that treat literary periods and genres - and speaking with department faculty. To keep a record of your choices, print the Worksheet for these Guidelines.
2) In formulating a plan, use the following as a guideline for a minimum number of works in each historical period of Classical, British, American, and World Literature:
| Category | Minimal Number of Authors/Works |
| Criticism and Literary Theory | 8 |
| Classical and Pre-Medieval | 8 |
| Medieval | 5 |
| Renaissance/Early Modern | 10 |
| 18th Century British and American | 12 |
| 19th Century British | 10 |
| 19th Century American | 10 |
| 20th Century British | 13 |
| 20th Century American | 13 |
| World Literature | 11 |
| Total | 100 |
3) When you sign up for your first Comprehensive Examination, submit this Worksheet to the MA Advisor. The plan is meant as a self-inventory of your own reading and thus a guide to your study for the exam. The exams will continue to be based not on any one individual's reading plan but on the published reading list in general. Knowledge of works by one hundred authors on the list is meant as the bare minimum that could be described as being “well read” in our field. In coursework you will of course read beyond this bare minimum in many areas. Please feel free to draw on your reading of texts appropriate to the questions asked in the exams regardless of whether or not the text is actually on your plan or on the MA Reading List itself.
Reading List
Critical and Theoretical Background to Literary Study For both Exam Parts I and II
Read at least 8 of the following authors, all found in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, plus a summary of the various schools:
Classical Theory and Criticism
Plato (ca. 427-ca. 347 B.C.E.) excerpts from Republic
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) Poetics
Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) Ars Poetica
Longinus (first century C.E.) from On Sublimity
Medieval and Renaissance Theory and Criticism
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) excerpts from Il Convivio
Christine de Pizan (ca. 1365-ca.1429) excerpts from The Book of the City of Ladies
Enlightenment Theory and Criticism
John Dryden (1631-1700) excerpt from “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy”
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) “Epistle to the Reader” from The Dutch Lover
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) “An Essay on Criticism”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) “On Fiction” in The Rambler No. 4 and Chapter X of Rasselas
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Critique of Judgment
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Romantic Theory and Criticism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) excerpts from Biographia Literaria
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) excerpts from A Defence of Poetry
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) “The American Scholar,” “The Poet”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) “The Philosophy of Composition”
Victorian/19 th Century Theory and Criticism
Karl Marx & Freidrich Engels (1818-1883) “The Communist Manifesto”
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) The Painter of Modern Life
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," excerpt from Culture and Anarchy
Walter Pater (1839-1894) excerpts from Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Henry James (1843-1916) “The Art of Fiction”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) excerpts from The Birth of Tragedy
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
Contemporary Theory and Criticism
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) excerpts from The Interpretation of Dreams, “The 'Uncanny'” and “Fetishism”
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) “Course in General Linguistics”
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) “Criteria of Negro Art”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) excerpts from A Room of One's Own
Boris Eichenbaum (1886-1959) excerpts from The Theory of the “Formal Method”
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) “The Formation of the Intellectuals”
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) “What White Publishers Won't Print”
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) excerpts from Discourse in the Novel
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) “Marxism and Literature”
Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) excerpt from The Well Wrought Urn
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) excerpt from The Second Sex
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text”
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) Marxism and Literature
Franz Fanon (1925-1961) The Wretched of the Earth
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) “What Is an Author?” and excerpts from The History of Sexuality
Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) “Interaction between Text and Author”
Hayden White (1928- ) “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”
Adrienne Rich (1929- ) excerpt from Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Chinua Achebe (1930- ) “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness”
Harold Bloom (1930- ) excerpts from The Anxiety of Influence
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) excerpts from Of Grammatology and Dissemination
Stuart Hall (1932- ) “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”
Frederic Jameson (1934- ) excerpts from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
Edward Said (1935-2003) Introduction to Orientalism
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar (1936-) & (1944-) excerpt from The Madwoman in the Attic
Stanley Fish (1938- ) “Interpreting the Variorum”
Gayatri Spivak (1942- ) excerpt from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942- ) excerpt from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Stephen Greenblatt (1943- ) Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
Barbara Smith (1946- ) “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
Homi K. Bhabha (1949- ) “The Commitment to Theory”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950- ) Introduction to Between Men
Judith Butler (1956- ) excerpts from Gender Trouble
Modern and Contemporary Critical Schools and Movements
Either read the brief summary at the back of the Norton (2532-2552) or read about all of the following in any good glossary or handbook of literary terms:
Formalism
New Criticism
Structuralism and Semiotics
Reader-Response Criticism
Deconstructive Criticism
Marxism
New Historicism
Historical Criticism
Postcolonial Criticism
Cultural Studies
Race and Ethnicity Studies
Psychological Criticism
Feminist Criticism
Queer Theory
Literature for the Part I Exam
Classical and pre-Medieval Literature
(Read 8)
Gilgamesh (7 th C BC)
Homer:Iliad 1, 6, 9, 18, 22, 24, Odyssey.
Virgil, Aeneid, 1,2,4,6,8,12.
Ovid,Metamorphoses
AeschylusThe Oresteia
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone
Euripides, Medea
Aristophanes, Lysistrata (or The CloudsÉ)
The Bible: Genesis; Exodus; Judges 13-16; 1 Samuel 16-18; Job; Psalms 1, 2, 11, 14, 22, 23, 90, 121, 137; Proverbs 1:1-10, 15:1-5, 31:10-31; Isaiah 1-10, 40, 52-56; Jonah; Luke; John 1-2; Revelation 1, 2, 4-6.
Medieval Literature
(Read 5)
Old English Narrative and Lyric Poetry: Beowulf, “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Wife's Lament “The Battle of Maldon.” (in Anglo-Saxon or in translation)
Dante (1265-1321) Inferno, 1-5,11- 14,18-19,24-26,31-34; Purgatorio,1-3,8-10,16-33; Paradiso,1-2,10-13,16-19,23,30-33.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?-1400) The Canterbury Tales , including at least the General Prologue, Knight's Tale, Miller's Tale, Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, Clerk's Tale, Merchant's Tale, Franklin's Tale, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, Prioress's Tale, Nun's Priest's Tale.
Chaucer, GeoffreyTroilus and Criseyde
Verse RomanceSir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375-1400)
Allegory and Mysticism: Pearl , Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love (Marion Glasscoe, ed., rev. ed. [Exeter, 1993])
Lyrics: R. L. Stevick, ed., One Hundred Middle English Lyrics, rev. ed. [Urbana, Ill., 1994], and/or Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics, Norton Critical Edition [New York, 1974])
Middle English Drama: Morality and Mystery (Cycle) Plays: Everyman, Second Shepherd's Play (Wakefield).
Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) selections from Le Morte d'Arthur (Preferred edition: E. Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd ed., rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. [Oxford, 1990]; Caxton's widely available text is also acceptable.) including at least “Merlin” Section I (= Caxton, Book I) “The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones” Section XIV: Launcelot and Elaine (= Caxton, Bk XI, XII, Chaps. 1-10) “The Tale of the Sankgreal” (= Caxton, Bks XIII-XVII) “The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” (= Caxton, Bks XVIII-XIX) “The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon” (=Caxton, Bks XX-XXI).
Renaissance/Early Modern Literature
Read at least 10: 8 English, 2 from Colonies
Sir Thomas Wyatt The Elder (1503-1542) &Henry Howard, Early of Surrey (1517-1547) All selections from the Norton Anthology of English Literature for both.
Elizabeth I, (1533-1603) Speeches, letters, and poetry (selections from the Norton acceptable)
Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1554-1618) selected poems
William Shakespeare (1564-1616): 2 plays from each dramatic mode (comedy, tragedy, history, romance) the Sonnets and a narrative poem.
John Milton (1608-74) Paradise Lost, Areopagitica, sonnets
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599): Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's Shorter Poems
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586): The Defence of Poesy, The Old Arcadia, sonnets (Astrophel and Stella)
Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) Edward II ; Dr. Faustus, Tamburlaine
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) Volpone (1607) Bartholomew Fair, and selected poems.
John Webster (1578-1630s?) The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) and Thomas Dekker (1572-1632) The Roaring Girl
Elizabeth Cary (1585-1618) The Tragedy of Mariam
John Donne (1572-1631) Selected Poems(Bloomsbury)
Robert Herrick (1591-1674) Poems in the Norton Anthology
George Herbert (1593-1633) Selected Poetry of George Herbert
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/159.html
Richard Crashaw(1613-1649) Steps to the Temple(1646)
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Selected Poems(Bloomsbury)
Writers of the American Colonies
John Winthrop (1588-1649) A Modell of Christian Charity
William Bradford (1590-1657) Of Plymouth Plantation
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) selected poems (from either the Norton or Heath)
Mary Rowlandson (1636?-1711) The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson)
Restoration and 18th Century
Read at least 12: 10 British, 2 from America
John Dryden (1631-1700) “Absalom and Achitophel”, and “MacFlecknoe,” All for Love
George Etherege (1634?-1691?) The Man of Mode
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) The Rover, Oroonoko
William Wycherley (1640-1716) The Country Wife
Thomas Otway (1652-1685) Venice Preserv'd
Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731) Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, or Roxana
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels, “A Modest Proposal” and A Tale of a Tub
William Congreve (1670-1729) The Way of the World
Edward Young (1683-1765) Selected Poetry(Carcanet)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad Book IV
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) Clarissa or Pamela
James Thomson (1700- 48) selections from The Poetical Works of James Thomson
Henry Fielding (1707-54) Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) Rasselas, “Pope” from Lives of the Poets, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,”
Laurence Sterne (1713-68) Tristram Shandy
Thomas Gray (1716-71) Selected Poems (Bloomsbury)
William Collins (1721-59) Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects
Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-74) The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer “The Deserted Village”
William Cowper (1731-1800) Selected Poems (Fyfield)
Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) The School for Scandal
Frances Burney (1752-1840) Evelina
Writers of the American Colonies and the future United States
Edward Taylor (1642-1729) Poems of Edward Taylor
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) pick two of the following: “Images of Divine Things,” “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) The Autobiography
J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur (1735-1813) from Letters from an American Farmer: “Letters 1-3" and “Letters 9-12.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) Notes on the State of Virginia
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) selected poems (from Norton or Heath anthology)
Literature for the Part II Exam
(note that the criticism section is for both parts I and II)
Romantic and 19 th C British Literature
Read at least 10
Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem (1812), “Rights of Woman”
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) Beachy Head and Elegiac Sonnets (1795)
William Blake (1757-1827) Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) Vindication of the Rights of Man, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Robert Burns (1759-1796) “To a Mouse” and Selected Poems
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) De Montfort
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude (Books 13 & 14) selected poems, and Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads)
Walter Scott (1771-1832) Waverley, Rob Roy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Lyrical Ballads, Selected Poems (Gramercy)
Jane Austen (1775-1817) Pride and Prejudice or Northanger Abbey
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) Don Juan, Selected Poems (Penguin)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Selected Poetry and Prose (Modern Library)
John Keats (1795-1821) Selected Poems (Penguin)
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Sartor Resartus
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) Frankenstein (1818) and Introduction to 1831 version of Frankenstein
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) Sonnets from the Portuguese
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) On Liberty, Essays on Sexual Equality
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) Idylls of the King or In Memoriam and selected poems
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) Vanity Fair
Robert Browning (1812-89) Selected Poems (Penguin)
Charles Dickens (1812-70) David Copperfield or Great Expectations
Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte (1818-48) Wuthering Heights
George Eliot (1819-80) Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss
John Ruskin (1819-1900) The Stones of Venice, edited and abridged by J. G. Links
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/7.html
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) The Moonstone
D. G. Rossetti (1828-82) Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/284.html
Christina Rossetti (1830-94) “Goblin Market” and Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/283.html
William Morris (1834-96) Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/236.html
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) Selected Poems (Fyfield)
Walter Pater (1839-94) Selected Writings of Walter Pater (Columbia)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Jude the Obscure or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Selected Poems (Everyman)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford)
Bram Stoker (1847-1912) Dracula
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray
19th Century American Literature (1783-1899)
Read at least 10
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) The Rights of Man (1791)
Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) Charlotte Temple
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) Wieland
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) The Pioneers
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) “Nature,” “The Over-Soul,” “Experience,” “Fate,” “The Rhodora,” “Circles.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter, “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” “Rappaccini's Daughter,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “The Old Manse.”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Purloined Letter,” Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/262.html
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden
Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
Walt Whitman (1819-1892):
ÐFrom the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: “Song of Myself.”
ÐFrom any edition: The “Calamus” sequence, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Song of the Open Road,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”
Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby Dick, “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby,” “Encantadas,” “The Bell Tower”
Harriet E. Wilson (1827?-1863?) Our Nig
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Final Harvest
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) Little Women
Mark Twain (1835-1910) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Modern Instance or A Hazard of New Fortunes
Henry James (1843-1916) The Portrait of a Lady; or “Daisy Miller,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Turn of the Screw”; or The Ambassadors; or The Wings of the Dove; or The Golden Bowl.
Sarah Orne Jewitt (1849-1909) Country of the Pointed Firs
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) The Awakening
Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) The Marrow of Tradition or The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line
Abraham Cahan (1860-1951)Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories
Frank Norris (1870-1902) McTeague
Stephen Crane (1871-1900): Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, short stories, like “The Open Boat,” “An Incident of War,” etc.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) Sister Carrie
20th Century British Literature
Read at least 13
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness
G.B. Shaw (1856-1950) Heartbreak House, Misalliance, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion
A.E. Housman (1859-1936) A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Selected Poems (Sterling)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Kim
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster (1879-1970) Passage to India or Howard's End
James Joyce (1882-1941) Ulysses, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob's Room, or The Waves
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) Sons and Lovers
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) Collected Poems 1908-1956 (Faber)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) Selected Poetry http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/247.html
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) Brideshead Revisited
Graham Greene (1904-1991) The Quiet American
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Waiting for Godot
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) Selected Poems (Vintage)
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Selected Poems (Phoenix)
Muriel Spark (1918- ) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Doris Lessing (1919- ) The Golden Notebook
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
John Fowles (1926- ) The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Osborne (1929-1994) Look Back in Anger
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) New Selected Poems 1957-1994
Harold Pinter (1930- ) The Caretaker and Old Times
Tom Stoppard (1937- ) The Real Inspector Hound or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Arcadia
Seamus Heaney (1939- ) Selected Poems (Noonday), Beowulf
Graham Swift (1949- ) Waterland
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954- ) Remains of the Day
Hanif Kureshi (1954- ) My Beautiful Laundrette
Zadie Smith (1975- ) White Teeth
20th Century American Literature
Read at least 13
Edith Wharton (1862-1937). The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence
W.E.B. du Bois (1868-1963) The Souls of Black Folk
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) Selected Poems (Penguin)
Willa Cather (1873-1947). My Antonia or Death, or Comes for the Archbishop
Robert Frost (1874-1963) Collected Poems
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). The Yale Gertrude Stein
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The Palm at the End of the Mind
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) The American Language (1919)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). Paterson, Selected Poems
Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Selected Poems, Selected Cantos
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961) Selected Poems
Marianne Moore (1887-1972). Complete Poems
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) The Waste Land, Selected Poems
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) Anna Christie, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Claude McKay (1889-1948) Selected Poems
William Faulkner (1892-1962). Absalom! Absalom! or The Sound and The Fury, or Light in August
Jean Toomer (1894-1967) Cane
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) The Great Gatsby
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) A Farewell to Arms or The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls, or The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) Lolita or Pale Fire
Zora Neale Hurston (1901?-1960) Their Eyes Were Watching God
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Collected Poems
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
Clifford Odets (1906-1963) Golden Boy
Lillian Hellman (1906-1984) The Children's Hour, or The Little Foxes
Eudora Welty (1909-2001) Selected Stories
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) Complete Poems
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or A Streetcar Named Desire
John Cheever (1912-1982) The Stories of John Cheever
Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956) America Is in the Heart
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) Invisible Man
John Berryman (1914-1972) 77 Dream Songs
Saul Bellow (1915- ) Humboldt's Gift
Arthur Miller (1915-2005) Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) Life Studies, For the Union Dead
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Selected Poems
Richard Wilbur (1921- ) Things of this World
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960
Norman Mailer (1923- ). Armies of the Night
James Baldwin (1924-1987). Go Tell It on the Mountain, or Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Truman Capote (1924-1984) In Cold Blood
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find
William Styron (1925-2006) Sophie's Choice
Alan Ginsburg (1926-1997) Howl, Selected Poems
James Merrill (1926-1995) Selected Poems 1946-1985
John Ashbery (1927- ) Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Neil Simon (1927- ) Lost in Yonkers, Barefoot in the Park
Edward Albee (1928- ) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or The Sandbox
Adrienne Rich (1929- ) Dark Fields of the Republic
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) A Raisin in the Sun
Toni Morrison (1931- ) Song of Solomon or Beloved
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) The Bell Jar, Ariel
Cormac McCarthy (1933- ) Blood Meridian
Philip Roth (1933- ) American Pastoral
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934- ) Dutchman, Selected Poetry
N. Scott Momaday (1934- ) House Made of Dawn
Don DeLillo (1936- ) White Noise or Underworld
Thomas Pynchon (1937- ) The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, or V
John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) A Confederacy of Dunces
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ) Tripmaster Monkey, Woman Warrior, or China Men
Luis Valdez (1940- ) Zoot Suit
Sam Shepard (1943- ) Buried Child
August Wilson (1945-2005) The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
David Mamet (1947- ) Glengarry Glen Ross
Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ) Ceremony
Ana Castillo (1953- ) So Far from God
Louise Erdrich (1954- ) Love Medicine or Tracks.
Tony Kushner (1956- ) Angels in America (Part I & II)
David Henry Hwang (1957- ) M. Butterfly
World Literature
Read at least 11: testing on this section will begin in Fall 2008
Anglophone (English literature not from Britain or America)
Susanna Moodie (1803-1885) The World Before Them
Joseph Furphy (1843-1912) Such is Life
Miles Franklin (1879-1954) My Brilliant Career
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) Wide Sargasso Sea
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) Minty Alley
Alan Paton (1903-1988) Cry, The Beloved Country
R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) The Guide
Patrick White (1912- ) Voss, A Fringe of Leaves
Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) The Palm Wine Drunkard
Nadine Gordimer (1923-) July's People or Burger's Daughter
Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) Nectar in a Sieve
Chinua Achebe (1930-) Things Fall Apart
Derek Walcott (1930-) Omeros or Selected Poems
[Edward] Kamau Brathwaite (1930-) The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy
V.S. Naipaul (1932-) A House for Mr. Biswas
Wole Soyinka (1934) A Dance of the Forests
David Malouf (1934-) Remembering Babylon, The Conversations at Curlew Creek
Bessie Head (1937-1986) A Question of Power
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1938) Petals of Blood
Bapsi Sidhwa (1938-) Cracking India
Margaret Atwood (1939-) The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye
Albert Wendt (1939-) Leaves of the Banyan Tree
J. M. Coetzee (1940-) Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians
Ama Ata Aidoo (1942-) Our Sister Killjoy
Peter Carey (1943-) True History of the Kelly Gang
Michael Ondaatje (1943-) The English Patient
Keri Hulme (1947-) Bone People
Salman Rushdie (1947-) Midnight's Children, or Satanic Verses
Jamaica Kincaid (1949-) A Small Place
Jessica Hagedorn (1949-) Dogeaters
George Lamming (1953-) In the Castle of My Skin
Ha Jin (1956-) Waiting, Under the Red Flag
Caryl Philips (1958-) Crossing the River
Arundhati Roy (1961-) The God of Small Things
Edwidge Danticat (1969-) Krik? Krak!
Modern World Literature in Translation
Fyodor Doestoevsky (1821-1881) Notes from Underground
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) Madame Bovary
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) poems from The Flowers of Evil
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) A Doll's House
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Anna Karenina
Emile Zola (1840-1902) Germinal
Anton Chekov (1860-1904) The Cherry Orchard
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Home and the World
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) Six Characters in Search of an Author
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Buddenbooks, Doctor Faustus, Magic Mountain or Death in Venice
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) The Metamorphosis
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) Three Penny Opera, Mother Courage
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Labyrinths
Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) Snow Country
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) The Essential Neruda
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) Chitchat on the Nile, Children of Gabelawi
Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) stories from Partitions (“Toba Tekh Singh,” “Third Letter to Uncle Sam”)
Mahashweta Devi (1926-) Imaginary Maps
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-) One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gunter Grass (1927-) The Tin Drum
Carlos Fuentes (1928-) The Crystal Frontier
Tayeb Salih (1929-) Season of Migration to the North
Assia Djebar (1936-) Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade
[Rev. 10/07]
