Reading List for Majors
Division of Literary Periods
Students need to select eight of eleven literary divisions from the following: The Middle Ages (to ca. 1485), The Sixteenth Century (1485-1603), The Seventeenth Century (1603-1660), The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1785), The Romantic Period (1785-1830), The Victorian Age (1830-1901), 20th-Century British, Colonial American, American Renaissance, 20th-Century American, Literary Criticism.
Students may be examined in a maximum of five British periods, with the other three coming from American literature and/or literary criticism.
See Film Studies Concentration requirements at the bottom of this page.
Area 1: The Middle Ages (to ca. 1485)
"The Wanderer"
"The Wife's Lament"
"The Dream of the Rood"
"Sunset on Calvary"
"I Sing of a Maiden"
"Adam Lay Bound"
The Wakefield Second Shepherd's Play
Beowulf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Malory: Morte D'Authur (bks. 20-21 of the Caxton Edition or "The Death of King Arthur")
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales: "The General Prologue," The Wife of Bath's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," and "The Nun's Priest's Tale"
Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman: "The Prologue" [The Field of Folk] and "Passus 5"
Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe: "Pilgrimage to Jerusalem" and "Examination Before the Archbishop"
Area 2: The Sixteenth Century (1485-1603)
Wyatt: "Whoso List to Hunt," "The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor," and "They Flee From Me"
Surrey: "Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought"
Sidney: Astrophil and Stella: Sonnets 1, 49, 53; The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (Book 2, Chapter 2); The Defense of Poesy
Marlowe: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
Spenser: The Faerie Queene: Letter; Book One, Canto One; Book One, Canto Ten; Book Two, Canto Twelve (the Bower of Bliss)
Shakespeare: Sonnets 55, 130, 138, 144
Hamlet or Twelfth Night
Ralegh: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
Queen Elizabeth: "On Monsieur's Departure," "The doubt of future foes," "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, 1588"
Choose one: Sir Thomas More's Utopia or Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
Area 3: The Seventeenth Century (1603-1660)
Donne: "The Flea," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day," and Holy Sonnet 13
Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress" and "A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body"
Jonson: Volpone
Milton: Paradise Lost: I, II, IV
Wroth: from The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and ""In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn"
Herbert: The Temple: "The Altar," "Jordan," "The
Windows," and "Love (III)"
Herrick: "Corinna's Going A-Maying" and "To the Virgins, to Make Much
of Time"
Area 4: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1785)
Congreve: The Way of the World
Dryden: "Mac Flecknoe"
A. Finch: "The Introduction" and "A Nocturnal Reverie"
Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress: "Vanity Fair," "The Slough of Despond," and "The Celestial City"
Swift: "A Description of a City Shower" and Gulliver's Travels, Part 4
Johnson: The Rambler, Number 4 and Lives of the Poets: Cowley [Metaphysical Wit]
Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson
Pope: "The Rape of the Lock"
Choose between the following novels
Fielding: Joseph Andrews
Defoe: Moll Flanders
Area 5: The Romantic Period (1785-1830)
Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience: "The Lamb" and "The Tyger"
Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapters 2 and 4
Wordsworth: "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "London, 1802"
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Shelley: "Ozymandias" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "A Thing of Beauty," and "Eve of St. Agnes"
Austen: Pride and Prejudice
M. Shelley: Frankenstein
Area 6: The Victorian Age (1830-1901)
E. B. Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese (choose one)
R. Browning: "My Last Duchess"
Tennyson: "The Lotus-Eaters" and "Ulysses"
Arnold: "Dover Beach" and Culture and Anarchy, Chapter 1 (Sweetness and Light)
C. Rossetti: "Goblin Market"
Hopkins: "The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord"
Bronte: Jane Eyre
Dickens: Hard Times
Shaw: Mrs. Warren's Profession or Major Barbara
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Area 7: 20th Century British
Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Joyce: "The Dead"
Hardy: "Channel Firing," "Hap," and "Convergence of the Twain"
Yeats: "The Second Coming," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children"
D. Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and "Fern Hill"
Larkin: "Church Going"
S. Smith: "Not Waving But Drowning," "The Person From Porlock," "Our Bog is Dood," "The New Age," and "Pretty"
Auden: "Musee des Beaux Arts," "Lullaby" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"
Walcott: "A Far Cry from Africa" and "Midsummer"
Heaney: "Digging" and "Casualty"
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Beckett: Endgame
Stoppard: The Real Inspector Hound
Pinter: The Dumb Waiter
Area 8: Colonial American
Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation, Chapters 1, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 28
Bradstreet: "The Prologue" and "The Author to Her Book"
C. Mather: Wonders of the Invisible World: "A People of God in the Devil's Territory" and "The Trial of Martha Carrier"
Winthrop: A Model of Christian Charity from The Journal of John Winthrop
Edwards: "Letter to Rev. Dr. Benjamin Colman (May 30, 1735)"
Woolman: from Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes
A. Adams: "Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776"
Paine: The Age of Reason
Franklin: The Autobiography: "Project for Moral Perfection"
Wheatley: "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
Brown: from Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale
Area 9: American Renaissance
Emerson: "Self-Reliance"
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and "Young Goodman Brown" or "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"
Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Purloined Letter"
Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Thoreau: Walden: "Economy," "Where I Live, and What I Lived For," "Conclusion"
Whitman: Song of Myself and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
Melville: "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Billy Budd, Sailor or Moby Dick (the complete text, not the Norton selections)
Crane: "The Open Boat"
Davis: Life in the Iron Mills
Dickinson: #465 "I heard a Fly buzz"; #303 "The Soul selects her own Society"; #448 "This was a Poet"; #510 "It was not Death, for I stood up"; and #754 "My Life had Stood-a Loaded Gun-"
Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
James: Daisy Miller
Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I, VII, X, XIV, XXI, XLI
Wharton: House of Mirth
Chopin: The Awakening
Area 10: 20th-Century American
Cather: O Pioneers
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Silko: Ceremony
Morrison: Beloved
T. Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Wilson: Fences
Hemingway: "Snows of Kilimanjaro"
O'Connor: "Good Country People"
Carver: "Cathedral"
Walker: "Everyday Use"
Yamamoto: "Seventeen Syllables"
Frost: "The Oven Bird," "Birches," and "Design"
W.C. Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "Spring and All"
Pound: "In a Station of the Metro," "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts"
Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land (first and final sections), and "Burnt Norton"
Bishop: "The Fish" and "The Moose"
Stevens: "Sunday Morning, " "The Idea of Order at Key West," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Brooks: "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon"
Oliver: "The Black Snake"
Ginsberg: "Howl"
Ashbery : "Illustration," "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," "Soonest Mended"
Rich: "Diving Into the Wreck" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law"
Hughes: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I, Too"
Harper: "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" and "Nightmare Begins Responsibility"
F. O'Hara: "The Day Lady Died" and "A Step Away From Them"
Area 11: Literary Criticism
Plato: The Republic, Book X
Aristotle: Poetics
Horace: Ars Poetica
Dryden: "Essay on Dramatic Poesy"
Sidney: "An Apology for Poetry"
Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare"
Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Poe: "The Philosophy of Composition"
Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
Woolf: A Room of One's Own, Chapter 6
Wimsatt, Beardsley: "The Intentional Fallacy"
L. Hughes: "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
Frye: from The Archetypes of Literature
Mulvey: "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Foucault: "What is an Author?" and The History of Sexuality
Fish: "Is There a Text in this Class?" (the essay, not the book)
Derrida: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
Butler: Gender Trouble
Bordo: Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
Kolodny: Dancing Through the Minefield . . .
Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Bakhtin: "Discourse in the Novel"
Iser: "Interaction Between Text and Reader"
Rich: "When We Dead Awaken"
Film Studies Concentration
Students in the Film Sutdies Concentration are required to test in Areas 12, 13, and 14, and five other areas with a maximum of four from British areas. Only Film Stuies students are allowed to test in areas 12, 13, and 14.
Area 12: American Film
The Apartment
Citizen Kane
Do the Right Thing
The Godfather I & II
Manhattan
Bonnie and Clyde
Nashville
The Searchers
Sunset Boulevard
Taxi Driver
2001
Vertigo
Apocalypse Now
The Piano
It Happened One Night
Modern Times
Singin' in the Rain
Mulholland Drive
Double Indemnity
The Graduate
On the Waterfront
Fargo
Unforgiven
American Beauty
Pulp Fiction
Area 13: International Film
Wings of Desire
400 Blows
Lawrence of Arabia
8 1/2
Blow Up
La Dolce Vita
M
Pather Panchali
The Third Man
All About My Mother
Decalogue (Three Selections)
Battleship Potemkin
Raise the Red Lantern
The Seven Samurai
A Taste of Cherry
Scenes from a Marriage
The Battle of Algiers
The Conformist
Fanny & Alexander
Jules and Jim
My Life as a Dog
The Red Shoes
Rashoman
Black Orpheus
Un chien andalou
Area 14: Film Theory
Sergei Eisenstein "The Dramaturgy of the Film Forum"
Andre Bazin "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema"
"The Myth of the Total Cinema"
Brian Henderson "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style"
Christian Metz "Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema"
"Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film"
William Rothman "Against 'The System of the Suture'"
Kaja Silverman "On Suture"
Rudolf Arnheim "The Complete Film"
Stam and Spence "Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction"
Christine Gledhill "Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism"
Stan Brakhage from Metaphors on Vision
Erwin Panofsky "Style and Medium in the Motion Picture"
Peter Wollen "Auteur Theory"
Miriam Hansen "Valentino and Female Spectatorship"
Leo Braudy "Genre: The Conventions of Connection"
Linda Williams "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess"
Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Jean-Louis Baudry "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in
Cinema"
Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Manthia Diawara "Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance"
