M.A. In English Comprehensive Exam and Reading List

At the close of their studies for an M.A. in English at Xavier University, students must pass a written, closed-book comprehensive examination based on works of literature, linguistics, composition and literary theory. The exam is administered in November and April of each year. The department faculty choose fifteen of these works; the remaining three works are chosen by the student.  This reading list is revised every two years. Students wishing to sit for the exam must notify Ms. Linda Loomis, the English Department Secretary, one month in advance of an exam date. As in the past, students will be required to answer at least one comparative question and several essay questions on individual works. There will also be a section requiring specific textual analysis or explication of one or more passages from one or more of the works on the lists.

The comprehensive exam for the Master's Program in English will be given Thursday, November 12, 2009, from 8:45 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Students planning to take the exam should notify the Director of the Graduate Program, Dr. Alison Russell, by Friday, October 9. A phone message to the department secretary at 745-2887 is sufficient. If you plan to take the exam in November, be sure to have your three individually chosen books approved by October 9.

On November 12, students should come to the department office (236 Hinkle) at 8:45 a.m.

Reading List for M.A. Comprehensive

(for exams given from November 2008, through April 2010)

NOTES :

The M.A. Comprehensive will be a closed-book exam and will be administered in the Hinkle Hall second floor student lounge. Please arrive in the department office (Hinkle 236) at 8:45 on the morning of the exam and bring with you five empty bluebooks.

As in the past, students will be required to answer at least one comparative question and several essay questions on individual works. There will also be a section requiring specific textual analysis of one or more passages from one or more of the works on the list.

1. Chaucer, The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, The Clerk's Prologue and Tale, and The Franklin's Prologue and Tale.

Useful Reading:

        Beidler, Peter G., ed.  The Wife of Bath. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism.  New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996.

        Biebel, Elizabeth M.  “A Wife, A Batterer, A Rapist: Representations of ‘Masculinity’ in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.”  Masculinities in Chaucer. Ed. Peter G. Beidler.  Bury St. Edmunds: D. S. Brewer, 1998.  63-75.

        Cartlidge, Neil.  “Marriage, Sexuality, and the Family.”  A Concise Companion to Chaucer.  Ed. Corinne Saunders.  Oxford: Blackwell P, 2006.  218-240.

        Dinshaw, Carolyn.  Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

        Kittredge, G. L.  “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage.”  Modern Philology 9 (1912): 435-67.

 

2.  John Milton, Paradise Lost, Ed. Gordon Teskey.  3rd rev. ed.  New York: Norton, 2004.  Books  1-4, “The Verse” from the second edition(1674), and the proem to Book 9 (lines 1-47).

Useful Reading:

        Fish, Stanley Eugene.  “Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling.”  Surprised by Sin:  The Reader in Paradise Lost. London:  MacMillan, 1967.  1-56.

        Lewalski, Barbara K.  “The Genres of Paradise Lost:  Literary Genre as a Means Accommodation.”  Milton Studies 17 (1983): 75-103.

        McColley, Diane K.  “Milton and the Sexes.”  The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Ed. Dennis Danielson. Cambridge:  U of Cambridge P, 1999.  174-92.
 

3.  Shakespeare, The Tempest, The Norton Shakespeare: Romances and Poems.  Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt.  New York: Norton, 1997. 329-389.

Useful Reading:

        Bergeron, David M.  “Shakespeare’s Romances:  The Tempest.”  Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family. Lawrence, KS:  U of Kansas P, 1985.  178-203.

        McDonald, Russ. “Reading The Tempest.” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990):  15-28.

        Skura, Meredith. “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 42-69.

 


4.  Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings.  Ed.William Richey and Daniel Robinson.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.  Students should read the 1798 edition of poems included in the 2002 edition (pp.11-115) and Wordsworth's "Preface" (pp.390-411).
 
Useful Reading:

        Butler, Marilyn.  "Art for the People in the Revolutionary Decade: Blake, Gillray, and Wordsworth."  In Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.

        McEathron, Scott. “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, v. 54 issue 1, 1999, p. 1-26. 

5.  Austen, Mansfield Park. 

Useful Reading:

        Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Norton Critical Editions), ed. by Claudia L. Johnson (New York and London:  W.W. Norton, 1998).

        Misty Anderson, “’The Different Sorts of Friendship’:  Desire in Mansfield Park” in Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, Ed. Devoney Looser (New York:  St. Martin’s, 1995):  167-83.

        Ellen Pollak, “Incest and Liberty:  Mansfield Park,” in Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003):  162-200.

        Edward Said, “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism (New York:  Knopf, 1993):  80-97.

6.  Dickens, Hard Times.

Useful Reading:

        Kate Flint, "Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Hard Times,1995.

        Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction,1992.

         Ann Humphreys, "Louisa Gradgrind's Secret: Marriage and Divorce in Hard Times," Dickens Studies Annual, 25 (1996) 177-196.

         Barry Stithner, "Hard Times: The Disciplinary City," Dickens Studies Annual, 30 (2001)193-215.


 

7.  W.B. Yeats selected poetry including "The Stolen Child", "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "The Cap and Bells," "He wishes his Beloved were Dead," "Adam's Curse," "September 1913," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Easter, 1916," "The Second Coming," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Tower," "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," "Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop," "Under Ben Bulben," "The Circus Animals' Desertion."

Useful Reading:

        "Recent Critical and Biographical Studies" Section of Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Edition), Ed. James Pethica (New York: WW Norton, 2000).

  

8.   Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman's Narrative. 

Useful Reading

The following essays in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds., In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Basic Books, 2004):

        Rohrbach, Augusta, “‘A Silent, Unobtrusive Way’: Hannah Crafts and the Literary Marketplace,” pp. 3-15.

        Andrews, William.  “Hannah Crafts’s Sense of an Ending,” pp. 30-42.

        IBruce, Dickson D.  “Mrs. Henry’s ‘Solemn Promise’ in Historical Perspective,” pp. 129-44.

        Levine, Robert S.  “Trappe(d): Race and Genealogical Hunting in The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” pp. 276-94.

9.  Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. 

Useful Reading:

        Smith, Victoria L.  A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, PMLA, Vol. 114, No. 2. (Mar., 1999), pp. 194-206.

        Fuchs, Miriam.  Djuna, Miriam Fuchs, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2. (Autumn, 1993), pp. 288-313

Useful Reading:

        Hilfrich, Carola.  “Anti-Exodus: Countermemory, Gender, Race, and Everyday Life in Toni Morrison's Paradise.”  MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 321-49.

        Omry, Keren. “Literary Free Jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: Language and Meaning” African American Review 41.1 (Spring 2007): 127-41.

11. David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly.

Useful Reading:

        Colleen Lye, "M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Anti-Essentialism: Minority Discourse in an International Frame," The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, Ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995), 260-89.

12.   Denise Levertov, Poems from Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002).

        “Illustrious Ancestors”

        “Wi        th Eyes at the Back of Our Heads”

        “Come into Animal Presence”
        “The Jacob’s Ladder”
        “The Ache of Marriage”
        “Song for Ishtar”
        “O Taste and See”
        “The Wings”
        “Life at War”
        “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”
        “Tenebrae”
        “A Woman Alone”
        “Candles in Babylon”
        “She and the Muse”
        “Caedmon”
        “Making Peace”
        “Annunciation”
        “Wings in the Pedlar’s Pack”
        “Sojourns in the Parallel World”
        “For Those Whom the Gods Love Less”
       

Useful Reading:

        Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, ed. Albert Gelpi (U of Michigan P, 1993).
       

 13. Nancy Bonvillain, Language, Culture and Communication: The Meaning of Messages.  5th ed.  Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. 2008. 

14.   bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. 

Useful Reading:

        Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Seaburgy P, 1970.

 

15.   M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (U of Texas P, 1981).  Read only “Epic and Novel” and “Discourse in the Novel.”

These titles are to be recorded in the student's file in the chair's office at least a month before he/she takes the exam. Each student will answer at least one question on at least one of these three works or groups of works.

Revised:  2/13/08