Download A comprehensive examination

THE GRADUATE COMPREHENSIVE IN ENGLISH
FORMAT OF THE EXAM
There will be four essay questions of one hour each configured as follows.
Question 1 will be an explication of a short poem not announced in advance.
Question 2 will focus on one of the eight historical periods of English and
American literature listed in the Central Catalog. See question 3 for further information.
Question 3 will focus on a second one of the eight historical periods OR on the areas of Rhetoric or
Linguistics or Literary Theory or Race/Gender/Ethnicity.
For questions 2 and 3, students will choose the period they will be tested on, and study topics have
been provided in each period to help them in making their choice (see below). Students will
designate their choices when they sign up for the exam about two weeks before it is administered.
Question 4 will require students to make a "bridge" or connection between 2 areas or periods, at
least one of which will be an area/period not designated by students for questions 2 and 3.
STUDY TOPICS FOR GRADUATE COMPREHENSIVES
Questions 2 and 3 of the graduate comprehensive exam will cover specific subject areas listed in
the catalog. Students will designate which areas they will write on when they sign up for the
comprehensive, but they should begin studying on those areas as they start their graduate work. To
assist students in deciding which areas to designate and to guide their studying, the Department has
identified several specific and broad topics in each of the areas. Those topics are listed below.
Please note that these topics are just to get students started and are not intended to exhaust all the
subjects a student might need to study in preparing for an exam in an area.
English Literature Before 1500
Narrow topics: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, Malory, Old and Middle English epic, medieval
romance, mystery plays, morality plays, Medieval lyrics—religious and secular, dream-visions,
didactic prose, courtly love, modesty topos, Lollard movement, Arthurian cycles, history and
chronicles, fabliau.
Broad Topics: Discuss/explain satire in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; examine the role/effect of
patronage on medieval romance, drama, and chronicle; compare/contrast the role of/attitudes
towards women in medieval secular vs religious writing; explore the effects of the War of the
Roses on Malory’s Morte Darthur; discuss the rise of native drama in Britain
English Literature from 1500-1640
Narrow topics: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Renaissance
comedy/tragedy, revenge tragedy, chronicle play, sonnet (Italian, English, sequence), love lyrics,
epyllion, pastoral.
Broad topics: convention and experimentation in the sonnet; the lady in sonnet sequences of
Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare and in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets; the carpe diem theme; the
erotic in Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Donne; metaphysical
poetry or the poetry of paradox; devotional poetry of Donne and Herbert; comic/tragic structures
and conventions; comic elements in tragedy and vice versa; parallels in tragedies and chronicle
plays; vice and justice in Shakespeare and Jonson; morality play elements in Marlowe and
Shakespeare.
English Literature from 1640-1800
Narrow topics: Blake, Defoe, Dryden, the gothic nove l, Johnson, Marvell, Milton, the pastoral,
poetry of sensibility (see Norton Anthology, Vol. I), Pope, Restoration comedy, satire, Swift.
Broad topics: images of men and women, neoclassical literary criticism, prevalence and variety of
mock genres, rise of the novel, virtue/the useful life, women writers.
English Literature from 1800-1900
Narrow topics: Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Arnold, Browning,
Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson, the Byronic Hero, the dramatic monologue, Gothic
literature, the Pre-Raphaelites, and realism in the novel.
Broad topics: Romantic attitudes toward nature, voices of revolution in Romantic literature, voices
of pessimism in Victorian poetry, prose and fiction, Victorian responses to science and technology,
varieties of narration in the 19th-century British novel.
English Literature from 1900 to the Present
Narrow topics: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Harold
Pinter, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Aud en, Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Seamus
Heaney, Doris Lessing, Anglo-Catholic novelists, the Angry Young Men.
Broad topics: Interior monologue in the novel, British-colonial literature (V. S. Naipaul, Jean
Rhys, Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, E. M. Forster), Impressionism (as an example of relationships
of art and writing), the Celtic Renaissance, Postwar British drama, the unreliable narrator in the
novel, leftist politics and modern British drama, the class system in modern British literature, time
in modern British fiction, the First World War in modern British literature.
American Literature to 1830
Narrow topics: William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas
Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, James
Fenimore Cooper, Gothic Romance, the history, the autobiography, the satire, American
metaphysical poetry.
Broad topics: Puritanism, rationalism and Deism, 18th-Century and early 19th-Century views of
nature, nationalism, the development of a distinctive American literature.
American Literature from 1830-1914
Narrow Topics: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, transcendentalism, naturalism, slave
narratives, Henry James, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton.
Broad topics: Romance vs novel in American fiction, closed and open form poetry of this period
("Schoolroom Poets" vs Whitman), the rise of Black Nationalism, the idea of Nature and of God as
a separate or dual concept from the transcendentalists through the naturalists, autobiography in
19th-century American literature.
American Literature from 1914 to the Present
Narrow topics: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, T. S. Eliot Wallace
Stevens, Eugene O’Neill, Toni Morrison, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee
Williams, Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson, H. D., Margaret Walker, W. E. B.
DuBois.
Broad topics: Harlem Renaissance, the influence of Imagism, the Jewish novel, confessional
poetry, the Southern novel, interior monologue/point of view in the novel, how postmodernism
differs from modernism, Hemingway’s/Faulkner’s influence on later writers, existential themes in
modern American literature, the vernacular style in modern American literature, departures from
realism in modern American fiction and drama.
Rhetoric
Narrow topics: Covino and Joliffe, Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries; Erika Lindeman,
A Rhetoric for the Writing Teacher; Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary; Gary Tate, et al. The
Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook; Ed White, Teaching and Assessing Writing; Peter Elbow,Writing
Without Teachers OR What is English?
Broad topics: teaching rhetoric to empower students, teaching in a writing workshop classroom,
the intrinsic link between writing and thinking, Kenneth Burke/s dramatistic theory, the uses of
Aristotelian proofs, (logical, emotional, ethical) using stasis theory to analyze a problem, the
evaluation of writing interactions among writer, audience, and topic.
Linguistics
Narrow topics: (for 4120) the status of ebonics in the public schools of the United States, melting
pot versus cultural mosaic philosophies’ impact on language policy, the effects of socioeconomic
status on the learning of literacy, how language can shape culture, political correctness in language
use, the effect on English resulting from its role as a world language, the effects, of a recognized
standard dialect, the cultural forces that determine a standard dialect—(for 4110) positional
variation and its manifestations in English phonology, the use of constituent structures,
transformations, and constraints to represent syntactic patterns in English, adherence to and
violation of Grice’s conversational maxims in communication, truth conditions in semantics, word
formation processes, social, regional and stylistic variations within languages, the value of using
two levels of representation for language (underlying and surface representations).
Broad topics: (for 4120) the role of culture in teaching/learning a second language, the relationship
between language and culture, the impact of socio-cultural variables on language use, social
determiners of dialect and style, the role of perceptio n in cross-cultural communication—(for 4110)
the systematic, rule-governed nature of language, nativist and empiricist understandings of
language acquisition, the process of constructing linguistic theory, language as a unique human
characteristic, the "living," evolving nature of language.
Theory
Narrow topics: Plato, Republic (Book X); Aristotle, Poetics; Saussure, The Course in General
Linguistics; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Barthes,
Criticism and Truth; Derrida, Writing and Difference; Culler, On Deconstruction; Kristeva, Desire
in Language; Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One; Foucault, The Foucault Reader; Greenblatt,
Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Gadamer, Truth and Method; Gates, The Signifying Monkey;
Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Williams, Marxism and Literature; Said, The World, the Text,
and the Critic; Butler, Gender Trouble.
Broad topics: Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics, Historicism and
Cultural Materialism.
Race/Gender/Ethnicity
Narrow topics: the woman question, what women should write, methods of rebellion, progressive
era women writers, magical realism, high modernism and the Great Divide, womanism, views of
women in literature, civil death, code switching, Black Arts movement, Black aesthetic,
immigration, assimilation, landscape, women’s club movement, the WPA, the Red Record, race
riots, the Great Depression and its effects on Race/Class/Gender, Aphra Behn, Phyllis Wheatley,
Sarah Parton (Fanny Fern), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ruth Harding Davis, Susan Glaspell, Edith
Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Tillie Olson, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Audre
Lorde, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Dorothy West, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Rita
Dove, Rudolfo Anaya, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Floyd Salas.
Broad topics: women and publishing; African American women and drama; women and drama;
discrimination, oppression, and social change; socialism and ethnicity; rise of the Black middle
class.