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

Printable Version in PDF

 

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:

 

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]