ENGLISH M.A. QUALIFYING EXAM LIST
Updated 10/5/2009
British (All MA candidates):
Chaucer: from The Canterbury Tales: "General Prologue" and Prologue and Tales told by the Wife of
Bath, the Pardoner, and the Nun's Priest
Shakespeare: Othello, Merchant of Venice
Spenser: Book I of Fairie Queene
Milton: Books 1, 2, and 9 from Paradise Lost
Swift: from Gulliver's Travels, Book 4: "Voyage to the Country of the
Houyhnhnms"
Pope: Epistle I from "An Essay on Man"
Austen: Emma
Blake: "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Little Vagabond," "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney
Sweeper" (both from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear"
Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey" and "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
Shelley: "Ode to the West Wind" and "Defense of Poetry"
Browning: "Andrea Del Sarto"
Rossetti: "In an Artist's Studio" and "Winter my Secret"
Hardy: Jude the Obscure
G. M. Hopkins: "God's Grandeur" and "Pied Beauty"
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
American (All MA candidates):
Selected poetry: Anne Bradstreet, "The Prologue To Her Book," "Here Follows Some Verses
Upon the Burning of our House," "The Flesh and the Spirit," "The Author to Her
Book" and Phyllis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," "To his Excellency
G. Washington," "On Imagination"
Dickinson: selections (numbers as listed in Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of ED):
49, 106, 165, 173, 178, 181, 216, 255, 258, 371, 426, 974, 985, 994, 84,
106, 175, 184, 185, 193, 204, 216, 280, 299, 1036, 1071, 1056, 1116, 70,
124, 185, 186, 230, 252, 284, 302, 319, 521, 1184, 1219
Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Thoreau: Walden, "Resistance to Civil Government"
Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappacini's Daughter," "The Birth-mark"
Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Melville: The Piazza Tales:
The Piazza
Bartleby, The Scrivener
Benito Cereno
The Lightning-Rod Man
The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles
The Bell-Tower
Roth: Call It Sleep
Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom
Ellison: Invisible Man
Selected poetry, modern and contemporary (students can find most of these works online):
Modernist Poetry:
Wm. C. Williams:—“Spring and All,” entire work, parts I-XXVIII; “Young Sycamore,”
“Paterson: the Falls,” and “The Dance”
Pound—“Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Canto I,” “Canto XIV,” “In a Station of the Metro,”
“Sestina: Altaforte”
Eliot—“The Four Quartets,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
H.D.-- “’Sea Rose,” “Chance Meeting,” “White World,’ “Phaedra,” “The Shepherd,” “A Dead
Priestess Speaks”
Gertrude Stein—Tender Buttons
Mina Loy—“Lunar Baedeker,” “Moreover, the Moon”
Contemporary Poetry:
Lyn Hejinian-- My Life
John Ashbery—“Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Robert Creeley—“Something,” “Words,” “The Finger,” “The Act of Love,” “The Pattern,” “The
Language,” “Distance”
George Oppen— “The Forms of Love,” “Boy’s Room,” “Of Being Numerous”
Alice Notley— from The Descent of Alette: [“a car” “awash with blood,”] [“I stood waiting”],
[“I walked into”], [“Presently”], [“The water, of the river”], and “At Night the States”
Yusef Komunyakaa- “Facing It,” “My Father’s Love Letters,” “Believing in Iron”
For students in creative writing:
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Non-fiction. Published
by Longman (any edition will do)
*selected essays, creative nonfiction
For students in rhetoric/pedagogy/literacy:
From Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, Cushman, Kingten, Kroll & Rose (Eds.)
Harvey Graff, "The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times"
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, "Unpackaging Literacy"
Luis Moll and Norma Gonzalez, "Lessons from Research with Language Minority Students"
Shirley Brice Heath, "Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate
Traditions"
Deborah Brandt, "Sponsors of Literacy"
David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University"
James Paul Gee, "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction" and "What is Literacy?"
Lisa Delpit, "The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse"
From Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, Villanueva, V. (Ed.)
Mina Shaugnessy, “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing”
James Berlin, “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”
Mike Rose, "Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and
Cognitive Reductionism"
Patricia Bizzell, "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing"
Victor Villanueva, "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism"
For students in literary criticism:
(All essays can be found elsewhere, but most are included in Lodge and Wood, Modern Criticism and
Theory, A Reader. 3rd Edition (2008)
Saussure, “The Object of Study”
Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”
Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious”
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter One and Two
Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host”
P. Schwieckart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading”
Greenblatt, “The Circulation of Social Energy”
Geoffrey Hartman, “The Interpreter’s Freud”
Julia Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics”
Raymond Williams, “Country and City, and A Problem of Perspective,” from The Country and the City
Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities”
Edward Said, “Crisis [in Orientalism]”
Meyda Yegenoglu, “The Battle of the Veil: Woman between Orientalism and Nationalism”
Judith Butler, “Critically Queer”