MA Exam Reading List (for students matriculating 2021 and after)

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.

 

 

 

1. Unknown	Beowulf: A New Verse Translation	Norton (Bilin)
2. Chaucer	Canterbury Tales	Norton Critical
3. Spenser	The Faerie Queene, Book I	Longman, ed.
4. Shakespeare	Othello & Twelfth Night	Lear: Pelican;
5. Cavendish	The Blazing World	Penguin, ed. L
6. Marvell	Complete Poems	Longman, ed.
7. Milton	Paradise Lost	Merritt Hughes
8. Defoe	Robinson Crusoe	Oxford, E.d, K
9. Wordsworth	The Prelude (1805)	Norton
10. Austen	Emma	Oxford
11. Whitman	The Leaves of Grass (1855)	Dover Thrift
12. Melville	Moby-Dick	Norton, ed. Pa
13. Rowlandson	The Narrative of the Captivity	Norton, Full 5
14. Eliot	Middlemarch	Oxford
15. Woolf	To the Lighthouse	Norton
16. Cather	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Vintage
17. Thiong’O	In the House of the Interpreter	Anchor
18. Bishop	Geography III: Poems	Farrar, Straus
19. Butler	Parable of the Sower	Grand central
20. Naipaul	A Bend in the River	Picador
21. Bolano	The Savage Detectives	Picador

* If a student wishes to answer questions about the films, she/he must petition the Graduate Committee by the end of the second semester of study.

22.	Sunrise*	F. W. Murnau, 1927
23.	Intolerance*	D. W. Griffith, 1916
24.	Notorious*	Alfred Hitchcock, 1946
25.	Under the Skin*	Jonathan Glazer, 2013
26.	At Land*	Maya Deren, 1946