MA Exam Reading List 

Preface

Although the English-speaking world and its cultural productions have always been diverse, in some periods of history, access to literacy and publication were the preserve of racial, ethnic and economic elites–often men. Such texts can nevertheless yield insights into contemporary disciplinary concerns such as race and gender, as they show how identity categories have been constructed, imposed and contested through language, literary form, character, etc. We encourage students to situate the texts on this list in the context of a wider range of voices whose literary works are lost or inaccessible, and to think about how the literary canon has been formed and who is left out. And we also welcome approaches that attend to the complicated afterlives of the texts as they have been critiqued, analyzed, reimagined and adapted by readers and writers who do not share the backgrounds of their original authors.

MA Exam List, CWRU English – revised Spring 2026

700-1000 AD, Unknown, Beowulf, translation by Howell Chickering

1387-1400, Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Norton Critical)

1590, Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I (Longman ed.)

1601-1606, Shakespeare, Othello & Twelfth Night (Pelican)

1633, Donne, Songs & Sonnets and Holy Sonnets (in The Complete Poetry and Selected 

Prose, Modern Library)

1667, Milton, Paradise Lost (Merritt Hughes)

1719, Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford)

1811, Austen, Emma (Penguin Classics)

1847, Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)

1850, Wordsworth, The Prelude (Norton)

1851, Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

1855, Whitman, The Leaves of Grass (Dover Thrift)

1899, Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

1933, 2025, Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Vintage) & Lin, The Autobiography 

          of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy)

1927, Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Norton)

1951, Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Everyman’s Library)

1976, Bishop, Geography III: Poems (FSG)

1980, Hejinian, My Life (Green Integer)

1984, Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (Grove)

1987, Morrison, Beloved (Vintage)

2012, Phillips, The Ground (FSG)

FILMS

Sunrise, F. W. Murnau (1927)

Intolerance, D. W. Griffith (1916)

Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock (1946)

At Land, Maya Deren (1946)

Wanda, Barbara Loden (1970)

Losing Ground, Kathleen Collins (1982)

Mulholland Drive, David Lynch (2001)

Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer (2013)

Us, Jordan Peele (2019)

 

MA Exam Terms & Guidelines, CWRU English – revised Spring 2026

During your oral exam, the committee will be interested to see how you situate the texts in their historical contexts, how you understand their formal strategies, and how you put them in conversation with each other. Our goal is that you will be able to demonstrate:

– familiarity with the texts

– ability to close read

– awareness of literary historical trends

– attention to literary form and narrative device

– ability to make connections across texts

The terms below may help in discussion of the works on the reading list. This is not an exhaustive list, nor will you be asked directly to define any term; these are some things you should be thinking about, that should arise naturally over the course of your reading, and that may naturally come up in the exam discussion. The goal, in other words, is that you be able to discuss what you have using a vocabulary appropriate to graduate study in English.

Historical periods such as:

Romanticism

Modernism

postcolonial

postmodernism

Forms and genres such as:

allegory

bildungsroman

blank verse

comedy

epic

free indirect discourse

narrative / story

free verse

Gothic

heteroglossia

lyric

marriage plot

realism / naturalism

satire

stream-of-consciousness

tragedy