Master's Exam

I finalized my reading list for my Master's Exam with my Chair today. Dr Lopez will serve as one of the three professors who will sit on my panel for my Master's (MA) exam that I will take on March 29, 2010. Regardless of what your GPA might be, if you do not pass your MA Exam, you do not graduate. I thought I'd post my list to give you guys an idea of what exactly I will be responsible for on my exam. I have to read every single thing on the list below and be held accountable for everything I learn from all of these. Soooooooo over Christmas break, I will be reading, reading, reading. I am also going to ask Santa for gift cards to Amazon or Barnes and Noble because I have LOTS of books to buy.
Love to you all,
S:)





English M.A. READING LIST


A. Pre-1500

1) The Beowulf Poet, Beowulf
2) Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “General Prologue,” “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s Prologue and Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “Clerk’s Prologue and Tale,” “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,” “Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale,” “Parson’s Prologue”
3) The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
4) Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyd



B. 1500-1600

1) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “A Letter of the Authors,” Book I (all), Book III (Cantos 1, 5-6, 9-12)
2) a) Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy; Astrophil and Stella 1, 7, 9, 20, 29, 45, 106, Second Song, Fourth Song
b) Queen Elizabeth I, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" and the "Golden Speech" (both are available in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 1)
3) William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest, Hamlet
4) William Shakespeare, One history play (Richard II), one tragedy (Macbeth), and one comedy (Twelfth Night)



C. 1600-1700

1) John Donne, “The Flea,” “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star”), “The Canonization,” “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” “Twickenham Garden,” Elegy 19 (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”), Holy Sonnets 10 (“Death Be Not Proud”), 14 (“Batter my heart”), and 17 (“Since she whom I loved”), “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Meditation 17” (from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)
2) John Milton, Paradise Lost
3) a) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover
b) Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World
4) Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Author to Her Book,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” “In Reference to Her Children,” “ In Memory of . . . Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666”


D. 1700-1800

1) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
2) Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism,” “An Essay on Man,” “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
3) Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of . . . George Whitefield,” “On Being Brought from Africa to America,”
“To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” “To S.M., a Young African Painter,” Letter to Rev. Samson Occom (Feb. 11, 1774)
Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic]”

4) William Blake, “All Religions are One,” “There is No Natural Religion” [a and b]; from
Songs of Innocence: “Introduction,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney
Sweeper,” “Holy Thursday”; from Songs of Experience: “Introduction,” “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Sick Rose,” “The Tyger,” “London”



E. 1800-c1850

1) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale
2) a) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
b) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
c) Sojourner Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman? Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851”
d) Frances E. W. Harper, “Ethiopia,” “An Appeal to my Country Women,” “Woman’s Political Future.”
3) William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Books I & XI, 1805 (not 1850) [Recommended text: Norton Critical Edition The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth], “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “The Ruined Cottage,” Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
4) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus


F. c1850-1915

1) Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain! My Captain!” “In Paths Untrodden,” “When I Heard at the Close of the Day”
Emily Dickinson, [Recommended Text: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Little, Brown, 1955] “Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?” (Poem 248), “Over the fence—” (251), “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (280), “Some keep the Sabbath going to church—” (324) “After great pain a formal feeling comes—” (341) “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (435), “I was the slightest in the House—” (486), “They shut me up in Prose—” (613), “I dwell in Possibility—” (657)
2) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3) George Eliot, Middlemarch
4) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “The Lady of Shalott”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “Andrea Del Sarto,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”


G. 1915-1945

1) T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Waste Land
2) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
3) Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez
4) Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat,” Their Eyes Were Watching God


H. 1945-1968

1) Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
2) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3) Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Artificial Nigger”


I. 1969-present

1) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
2) a) Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed., Introduction and Chapters 1-7
b) Lorna Dee Cervantes, from Emplumada, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” “Cannery Town in August,” “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” “For Virginia Chavez,” “Poems for the Young Man...,”
c) Cherrie Moraga, From The Last Generation “Queer Aztlán: the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe”; From: Loving in the War Years, Expanded 2nd ed., “Loving in the War Years,” “La Güera,” “A Long Line of Vendidas,” “Looking for the Insatiable Woman,” and “Out of our Revolutionary Minds Toward a Pedagogy of Revolt”
3) V. Nabokov, Pale Fire



J. ADDITIONAL LISTS

1) All students must include at least one numbered item from Section J on their individual exam list.

12. Gender Studies And Queer Theory
Virginia Woolf, From A Room of One’s Own: [Shakespeare’s Sister, Chloe Liked Olivia, Androgyny]
Adrienne Rich, From “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, From Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet
Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman”
Judith Butler, From Gender Trouble: Preface, “Subversive Bodily Acts”


Elected Works

(1) William Congreve, The Way of the World
William Wycherly, The Country Wife
(2) Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
(3) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(4) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
(5) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
(6) Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook,” “Design,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Oven Bird,” “Birches,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Gift Outright”