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M.A. Exam Reading List
Fall 2014 through Spring 2016
1. Cleanness, by the Gawain-Poet c. 1375
Useful reading: Keiser, Elizabeth B. Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of
Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts. Yale UP, 1997.
2. The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare
Useful readings: Paster, Gail Kern. "Seeing the Spider: Cognitive Ecologies in The Winter's Tale."
In Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind. Eds. Laurie Johnson,
John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Pitcher, John. "Introduction." The Winter's Tale. The Arden Shakespeare, third series. Ed. John Pitcher.
Methuen Drama. London: A & C Black Publishers, Ltd., 2010.
Kuzner, James. "The Winter's Tale: Faith in Law and the Law of Faith."Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory
in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24.3 (Fall 2012): 260-81.
3. "Turkish Embassy Letters," by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Useful reading: Johnson, Claudia L. On Austen: Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures. University of Chicago
Press, 2012.
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Stevenson
Useful readings: Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity, 1995.
Sedgwick, E. K. Between Men, 1985.
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5. Odes, by John Keats (1819; available in any edition of Keats's Complete or Selected Poems)
Useful reading: Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels, and Revolutionaries, 1981.
6. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, by Harriet Jacobs
Useful readings: Smith, Stephanie A. "Harriet Jacobs: A Case History of Authentication." The
Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey Fisch. New York:
Cambridge UP, 2007. 189-200.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. "Righting Slavery and Writing Sex: The Erotics of Narration in Harriet Jacobs's
Incidents." Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1993.
Foster, Frances Smith. "Writing across the Color Line: Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl." Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1993. 95-116.
7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Useful reading: Roudané, Matthew. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Toward the Marrow." The
Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 39-58.
8. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Useful reading: DeVere Brody, Jennifer. "The Blackness of Blackness... Reading the Typography of
‘Invisible Man.’" Theatre Journal 57:4: Black Performance. 679-69.
Lee, Kun Jong. “Ellison's Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revised." PMLA 107:2. 331-344.
9. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
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Useful readings: Kelly, Áine. "A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere: Encounters of Wallace Stevens
and Stanley Cavell." Journal of American Studies 46:3. 681-694.
Simons, Hi. "Wallace Stevens and Mallarmé." Modern Philology 43:4. 235-259.
Doggett, Frank. "Wallace Stevens' Later Poetry." ELH 25:2. 137-154.
10. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Useful readings: Liggins, Saundra. "The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist."
African American Review. 40.2 (2006): 359-369. Literary Reference Center.
Selzer, Linda. "Instruments More Perfect Than Bodies: Romancing Uplift in Colson Whitehead's The
Intuitionist." African American Review. 43.4 (2009): 681-698. Literary Reference Center.
Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. "Verticality is Such a Risky Enterprise: The Literary and Paraliterary Antecedents
of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist." Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 43.1 (2010): 148-156. Literary
Reference Center.
11. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi-Adiche
Useful reading: Gikandi, Simon. Language and Ideology in Fiction. Portsmouth [NH]: Heinemann,
1991.
12. Language, Gender, and Feminism by Sara Mills and Louise Mullany
Useful reading: Cameron, Deborah. The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak
Different Languages? New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
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13. Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton
Useful reading: Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature (1997).