mae study guide and reading list

1

Master of Arts in English

Comprehensive Exam Study Guide

and Reading List

During the comprehensive exam, students will respond to questions drawn from the following

areas of English Studies:

Rhetoric and Writing

The History of Rhetoric

Teaching Composition

Theory

Theory

Literature

American Literature to the Civil War

American Literature from the Civil War to the Present

British Literature of the Middle Ages

British Literature of the Early Modern Period

British Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries

World Literature

When registering for ENG 697 or ENG 698, students will consult with their directors and

readers, and with the approval of their directors and readers, students will identify three different

subtopics from the areas above.

Students can select no more than two subtopics from a single area. For example, a student might

choose World Literature, The History of Rhetoric, and Teaching Composition, but a student

could not choose, World Literature, American Literature to the Civil War, and British Literature

of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

The exam itself will include two questions for each of the three areas of interest chosen by the

student. Students will have the option of writing on one of the two questions that appear in each

section of the exam. Each of the exam periods will be two hours long. The first exam period runs

from 8:00 am to 10:00 am. The second exam period: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm. Students will have

90 minutes for lunch. The third exam period runs from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm. Exams will take

place in one of the second floor, Orr Center computer labs. If they choose to do so, students may

take blank paper and pens or pencils into the exam rooms to help them brainstorm and outline

responses. No other materials, including books and notes are permitted in the exam room.

Students are not permitted to access the internet during the exam.

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Students will access the exams through their course Blackboard sites. The Blackboard sites will

use the Respondus Lockdown Browser feature to prevent access to the internet. The exams will

be available on a timed basis, meaning they must be completed during the time assigned to work

on them. Students will not be able to go back and work on the question from the first exam

period, for example, after 10:00 am.

Thoughtful response to each exam question should be at least 1500 words.

Students will be provided with a blank flash drive to save backup their work.

The exam will be completed approximately one-third of the way through the 15-week Fall,

Spring, or Summer semester in which the student is enrolled in ENG 697 or ENG 698. Exam

dates for the 2015-2016 through 2019-2020 academic years are as follows:

Fall 2015: Sat. 09/26 Spring 2016: Sat. 02/13 Summer 2016: Sat. 06/11 Fall 2016: Sat. 09/24 Spring 2017: Sat. 02/11 Summer 2017: Sat. 06/10 Fall 2017: Sat. 09/23 Spring 2018: Sat. 02/10 Summer 2018: Sat. 06/09 Fall 2018: Sat. 09/22 Spring 2019: Sat. 02/09 Summer 2019: Sat. 06/08 Fall 2019: Sat. 09/21 Spring 2020: Sat. 02/15 Summer 2020: Sat. 06/13

The exam will be graded by the three committee members (the Director and the two Readers) of

the student’s final project. If the student passes the exam, he or she will be given approval to

begin work on the portfolio or thesis.

The exam will be graded on a pass/fail basis. If a student does not pass the exam, he or she will

meet with the Director and the two Readers of his or her committee, and set a date for the student

to take a second comprehensive exam. This date should be approximately five weeks after the

date of the first exam, but if the Director of the MAE Program, the Director and Readers of the

student’s project, and the student agree, a different date can be set. However, if the student does

not take the second exam by the end of the semester in which he or she is enrolled in ENG 697

or ENG 698, then a grade of “IP” or “In Progress” will be recorded and the student will need to

re-enroll for one additional semester in ENG 697 or ENG 698. Regardless of the date of the

second exam, when the student passes it, he or she will then be given approval to begin work on

the thesis.

If the student does not pass or for any reason does not take the second comprehensive exam, a

grade of "F" will be recorded for the course, and the student will be dismissed from the MAE

program.

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MAE Comprehensive Exam

Reading List

THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC

Those works listed as appearing in The Rhetorical Tradition can be found in:

The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Eds.

Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford, 2001.

Anonymous. Dissoi Logoi. The Rhetorical Tradition. 47-55.

Anonymous. Rhetorica ad Herennium, Book IV. The Rhetorical Tradition. 243-82.

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric.

Aspasia. “Plato, from Menexenus,” “Cicero, from De Inventione,” “Athenaeus, from

Deipnosophistae,” and “Plutarch, from Lives.” The Rhetorical Tradition. 56-66.

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine, Book IV. The Rhetorical Tradition. 450-85.

Burke, Kenneth. from Language as Symbolic Action. The Rhetorical Tradition. 1340-47.

Burke, Kenneth. “Part I: The Range of Rhetoric.” A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California

Press, 1969. 3-48.

Cicero. De Inventione.

Cicero. De Oratore.

Cicero. Orator.

Fish, Stanley. “Rhetoric.” The Rhetorical Tradition. 1605-27.

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. The Rhetorical Tradition. 42-46.

Isocrates. Against the Sophists. The Rhetorical Tradition. 67-74.

Isocrates. Antidosis.

Longinus. from On the Sublime. The Rhetorical Tradition. 344-58.

Plato. Gorgias, and Phaedrus. The Rhetorical Tradition. 80-168.

Quintilian. from Institutes of Oratory. The Rhetorical Tradition. 359-428.

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Teaching Composition

HISTORY OF RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

Reynolds, Nedra, Jay T. Dolmage, Patricia Bizzel, and Bruce Herzberg. “A Brief History of

Rhetoric and Composition.” The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing. 7th ed.

Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 1-17.

HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY

Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.

Carbondale: SIUP, 1987. Chapters 2, 3 (pp. 53-57), 4, and 7.

HISTORY OF THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Chapters 1, 3, and 4.

THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

from Cross-Talk in Composition Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. National Council of

Teachers of English (NCTE).

Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Reality in the Writing Class.”

Bertoff, Ann. “Is Teaching Still Possible: Writing, Meaning and Higher Order

Reasoning.” 309-24.

Bruffee, Kenneth. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” 395-

416.

Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” 7-16.

Flynn, Elizabeth. “Composing as a Woman.” 581-96.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer.” 279-90.

COGNITIVE THEORY AND DEVELOPMENTAL WRITING PEDAGOGY

Shaughnessy, Mina. P. Errors and Expectation: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing.

Oxford University Press, 1979. Chapters 1, 4, and 8.

EXPRESSIVIST THEORY AND DEVELOPMENTAL WRITING PEDAGOGY

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1998.

FEMINIST THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical

Sourcebook. Eds. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-

Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan. Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

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INTERDISCIPLINARITY, SITES, ESL, WAC, WID

from Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives. Eds. Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei

Matsuda. Boulder: Utah State University Press, 2012.

Addler-Kassner, Linda, and Susanmarie Harrington. “Creation Myths and Flash Points:

Understanding Basic Writing through Conflicted Stories.” 13-35.

Donahue, Christiane. “Transfer, Portability, Generalization: (How) Does Composition

Expertise ‘Carry’?” 145-66.

Downs, Doug, and Elizabeth Wardle. “Reimagining the Nature of FYC Trends in

Writing-about-Writing Pedagogies.” 123-44.

Estrem, Heidi, and E. Shelly Reid. “Writing Pedagogy Education: Instructor

Development in Composition Studies.” 223-40.

Gunner, Jeanne. “Scholarly Positions in Writing Program Administration.” 105-22.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Studying Literacy in Digital Contexts:

Computers and Composition Studies.” 188-98.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “Teaching Composition in the Multi-Lingual World: Second

Language Writing in Composition Studies.” 36-51.

Peeples, Tim, and Bill Hart-Davidson. “Remapping Professional Writing: Articulating

the State of the Art and Composition Studies.” 52-72.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-First Century: A

Primer.” 167-87.

ASSESSING/RESPONDING TO STUDENT WRITING

Connors, Robert J. and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student

Papers.” College Composition and Communication 44:2 (1993): 200-23.

Sommers, Nancy. Responding to Student Writers. Boston: Macmillan, 2013.

NCTE POSTSECONDAY POLICY STATEMENTS, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND

STANDARDS FRO WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION

“College.” NCTE. 2016. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

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Theory

OVERVIEW

You might start by looking at one of these well-written, accessible overviews to literary theory:

Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

(Manchester University Press, 2009)

Gregory Castle, The Literary Theory Handbook. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011)

Ann B. Dobie, Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. (Wadsworth,

2014)

Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory, An Introduction.

Pelagia Goulimari Literary Criticism and Theory: from Plato to Postcolonialism (Routledge,

2015)

Steven Lynn. Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory. (Longman,

2010)

Robert Dale Parker. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural

Studies. (Oxford, 2014)

Lois Tyson. Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide. (Routledge, 2015)

In addition, you should be familiar with the following excerpts from canonical theoretical works.

Those works listed as appearing in Norton can be found in:

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New

York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010 (2001).

NEW CRITICISM

Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy,” and “The

Affective Fallacy.” Norton. 1230-61.

RACE

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Norton. 1610-

23.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times.” Norton. 2427-38.

HISTORICISM

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Norton. 2150-61.

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STRUCTURALISM

de Saussure, Ferdinand. from Course in General Linguistics. Norton. 845-66.

GENRE

Bakhtin, Mikhail. from Discourse in the Novel. Norton. 1072-106.

READER RESPONSE

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” Norton. 1970-92

SEXUALITY AND POWER

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan

Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 195-228.

Foucault, Michel. from The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, Introduction. “The Repressive

Hypothesis.” Norton. 1502-21.

GENDER

Butler, Judith. from Gender Trouble. Norton, 2536-53.

FEMINISM

Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice,

and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” Norton. 2045-66.

NATIVE AMERICAN, MODELS OF INTERPRETATION

Allen, Paula Gunn, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres

Indian Tale.” Norton, 2000-21.

PSYCHOLOGY

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in

Psychoanalytic Experience.” Norton. 1156-69.

MARXISM

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure,” and “Hegemony.” Marxism and Literature.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 75-82 and 108-14.

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CANONICITY

Guillory, John. “Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate” Cultural Capital: The

Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago

Press, 1993. 3-82.

POST-MODERNISM

Hutcheon, Linda. “Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics.” Poetics of Postmodernism:

History, Theory and Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. 3-21.

POST-COLONIALISM

Said, Edward. from Orientalism. Norton. 1861-88.

WORLD LITERATURE

from World Literature: A Reader. Eds. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl

Thomsen. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.

Zhang Longxi. “Toward Interpretive Pluralism.” 135 – 141.

Franco Moretti. “Conjectures on World Literature and More Conjectures.” 160-75.

David Damrosch “What is World Literature?” 198–206.

MATERIAL CULTURE

Freedgood, Elaine. “Introduction: Reading Things” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the

Victorian Novel. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 1-29.

ANTI-THEORY

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Norton. 2126-37.

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American Literature to the Civil War

Anne Bradstreet

o “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory”

o “The Author to Her Book”

o “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”

o “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment”

“Upon the Burning of Our House”

o “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland

Emily Dickinson

o Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Belknap Press, 1986.

o from The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Belknap Press, 2005.

“I’m ‘wife’”

“Safe in their alabaster chambers”

“Wild nights”

“There’s a certain slant of light”

“Some keep the Sabbath”

“This was a poet”

“I heard a fly buzz”

“I started early”

“The brain is wider”

“Tell all the truth”

“The Bible is an antique volume”

“My life closed twice”

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Ralph Waldo Emerson

o from Nature

“Introduction”

Chapters 1-4

o “The American Scholar”

Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Herman Melville

o Moby Dick

o Benito Cereno. Ed. Wyn Kelley. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.

o Battle-Pieces and Poems and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems.

Edgar Allan Poe

o “The Raven”

o “Ulalume”

o “Annabel Lee”

o “Israfel”

o “The Fall of the House of Usher”

o “The Philosophy of Composition”

o “The Poetic Principle”

10

Lydia Huntley Sigourney

o “The African Mother at Her Daughter’s Grave”

o “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl of the American Asylum at Hartford, Connecticut”

o “To a Shred of Linen”

o “Niagara”

Henry David Thoreau

o from Walden

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

“Economy”

“Spring”

Phillis Wheatley

o “To the Public”

o “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”

o “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

o “To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works”

o “To his Excellency General Washington”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, (1855 ed.)

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American Literature

from the Civil War to the Present

E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel

T. S Eliot, The Waste Land

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Henry James, The Ambassadors

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Robert Lowell, Poems (all in the Norton Anthology):

o “Skunk Hour”

o “For the Union Dead”

o “Mr. Edwards and the Spider”

o “Memories of West Street and Lepke”

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Wallace Stevens

o “Sunday Morning”

o “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

o “The Idea of Order at Key West”

o “Of Modern Poetry”

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

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British Literature of the Middle Ages

Not Available

13

British Literature of the Early Modern Period

Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton

John Donne

o Songs and Sonnets

o Holy Sonnets

Elizabeth I, “Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, August 9, 1588”

John Foxe, Book of the Martyrs

Ben Jonson, Epicoene.

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I

Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella

William Shakespeare

o Hamlet

o Measure for Measure

o Othello

o Twelfth Night

Edmund Spenser

o The Faerie Queene, Books I-III

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

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British Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

o from Sonnets from the Portuguese

1: [I thought once how Theocritus had sung]

5: [I lift my heavy heart up solemnly]

6: [Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand]

7: [The face of all the world is changed, I think]

14: [If thou must love me, let it be for nought]

20: [Beloved, my Beloved, when I think]

22: [When our two souls stand up erect and strong’

26: [I lived with visions for my company]

28: [My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white!]

35: [If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange]

38: [First time he kissed me, he but only kissed]

43: [How do I love thee? Let me count the ways]

44: [Beloved, thou has brought me many flowers]

o “The Cry of the Children”

o “The Lady’s Yes”

o “To Flush, My Dog”

Robert Browning

o “My Last Duchess”

o “Porphyria’s Lover”

o “Fra Lippo Lippi”

o “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”

o “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Lord Byron

o “And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair”

o “Darkness”

o “Epistle to Augusta”

o “January 22nd, Missolonghi”

o “Love and Death”

o “Prometheus”

o “She Walks in Beauty”

o “So We’ll Go No More a Roving”

o “Stanzas for Music”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

o “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

o “Kubla Khan”

o “Christabel”

o “Frost at Midnight”

o “Dejection: An Ode”

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

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Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah

Equiano, Chapters 1 and 2

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Eliza Haywood, Fantomina

John Keats

o “Ode to Psyche”

o “Ode to a Nightingale”

o “Ode to a Grecian Urn”

o “Ode on Melancholy”

o “Ode on Indolence”

o “To Autumn”

o “Bright Star”

o “Eve of St. Agnes”

o “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

o “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”

o “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

o “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”

Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself

Samuel Richardson. Pamela.

Percy Shelley

o “Ozymandias”

o “Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, Near Naples”

o “Ode to the West Wind”

o “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

o “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”

o “Music when Soft Voices Die (To --)”

o “Mutability” [The flower that smiles to-day]

o “Mutability” [We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon]

o “Ode to the West Wind”

o “To Wordsworth”

Jonathan Swift

o “The Lady’s Dressing Room”

o “A Modest Proposal”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

William Wordsworth

o “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

o “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

o “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the

Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”

o “Lines Written in Early Spring”

o “London, 1802”

o “Most Sweet it is”

o “Mutability”

o Preface to “Lyrical Ballads”

16

World Literature

Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”

Charles Baudelaire

o “The Flowers of Evil”

o “Correspondences”

o “To the Reader”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

Tadeusz Borowski, “To the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen”

Albert Camus, “The Guest”

Paul Celan

o “Deathfugue”

o “Shibboleth”

Anton Chekov, Lady with the Dog

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Mahmoud Darwish

o “Identity Card”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

o “Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz”

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns

Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West

Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way, Part I: “Combray”

Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Wislawa Szymborska

o “The Terrorist, He Watches”

Dangarembga Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions

Gao Xiaolo, I am China

17

SAMPLE


Comprehensive Exam

Student Name

Course Number

Semester

Date

EXAM #1: The History of Rhetoric, 8:00 am to 10:00 am

Write a thoughtful, well-argued response (at least 1500 words) to ONE of the following

questions:

Each writer on the reading list below emphasizes one or more of the rhetorical canons

(invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery). Choose two writers and explain how

the canon/s they privilege help to shape their rhetorical theory. Compare and contrast the

writers’ theories. In what significant ways do their canonical emphases differ?

[On the actual MAE exam, you will have the option of choosing between two questions for

each area in which you take exams. Only one sample question for each area is included here

on the study guide.]

You are encouraged to take some time (no more than 20-30 minutes) to brainstorm and outline

your response before writing your formal answer. You are allowed to use pen or pencil and

paper, but no other materials, including books and notes are permitted in the exam room. You are

not permitted to access the internet during the exam.

You should submit your response through the Blackboard site. The exam is available on a timed

basis, meaning they must submit your response before 10:00 am. You may backup your work on

the flash drive you have been provided.

The Reading list for The History of Rhetoric includes the following texts:

Anonymous. Dissoi Logoi.

Anonymous. Rhetorica ad Herennium, Book IV.

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric.

Aspasia. “Plato, from Menexenus.”

Aspasia. “Cicero, from De Inventione.”

Aspasia. “Athenaeus, from Deipnosophistae.”

Aspasia. “Plutarch, from Lives.”

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine, Book IV.

Kenneth Burke. Language as Symbolic Action.

Kenneth Burke. “Part I: The Range of Rhetoric.” from A Rhetoric of Motives.

18

Cicero. De Inventione.

Cicero. De Oratore.

Cicero. Orator.

Stanley Fish “Rhetoric.”

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen.

Isocrates. Against the Sophists.

Isocrates. Antidosis.

Longinus. On the Sublime.

Plato. Gorgias.

Plato. Phaedrus.

Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory.

19

SAMPLE


Comprehensive Exam

Student Name

Course Number

Semester

Date

EXAM #2: American Literature to the Civil War, 10:30 am to 12:30 pm


questions:

Discuss how the cultural work performed by the concept of “an American literature” differs

today from the period roughly 1775-1860. Back up your generalizations by referring in some

detail to several literary works from that period, comparing the cultural work they were

understood to be performing then with the cultural work they might be expected to perform

today. Feel free to question the use of the definite article in the phrase “an American

literature.”











The Reading list for American Literature to the Civil War includes the following texts:

Anne Bradstreet

o “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory”

o “The Author to Her Book”

o “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”

o “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment”

“Upon the Burning of Our House”

o “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”

20

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland

Emily Dickinson

o Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Belknap Press, 1986.

o from The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Belknap Press, 2005.

“I’m ‘wife’”

“Safe in their alabaster chambers”

“Wild nights”

“There’s a certain slant of light”

“Some keep the Sabbath”

“This was a poet”

“I heard a fly buzz”

“I started early”

“The brain is wider”

“Tell all the truth”

“The Bible is an antique volume”

“My life closed twice”

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Ralph Waldo Emerson

o from Nature

“Introduction”

Chapters 1-4

o “The American Scholar”

Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Herman Melville

o Moby Dick

o Benito Cereno. Ed. Wyn Kelley. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.

o Battle-Pieces and Poems and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems.

Edgar Allan Poe

o “The Raven”

o “Ulalume”

o “Annabel Lee”

o “Israfel”

o “The Fall of the House of Usher”

o “The Philosophy of Composition”

o “The Poetic Principle”

Lydia Huntley Sigourney

o “The African Mother at Her Daughter’s Grave”

o “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl of the American Asylum at Hartford, Connecticut”

o “To a Shred of Linen”

o “Niagara”

Henry David Thoreau

o from Walden

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

“Economy”

“Spring”

21

Phillis Wheatley

o “To the Public”

o “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”

o “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

o “To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works”

o “To his Excellency General Washington”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, (1855 ed.)

22

SAMPLE


Comprehensive Exam

Student Name

Course Number

Semester

Date

EXAM #3: World Literature, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm


questions:

With reference to at least four theorists and two literary works, discuss the challenges of

defining world literature. What do you understand by the category of World Literature? What

are some of the arguments for and against it?











The Reading list for World Literature includes the following texts:

Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”

Charles Baudelaire

o “The Flowers of Evil”

o “Correspondences”

o “To the Reader”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

Tadeusz Borowski, “To the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen”

Albert Camus, “The Guest”

Paul Celan

o “Deathfugue”

o “Shibboleth”

23

Anton Chekov, Lady with the Dog

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Mahmoud Darwish

o “Identity Card”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

o “Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz”

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns

Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West

Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way, Part I: “Combray”

Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Wislawa Szymborska

o “The Terrorist, He Watches”

Dangarembga Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions

Gao Xiaolo, I am China

mae study guide and reading list

Documents