English M.A. READING LIST
(Effective January 2009 through December 2010)
Note: The student’s individualized reading list will be composed of 41 of the items below:
25 asterisked items in each category A-I
16 selected items, 1 each from category A-J (for a total of 10) and
6 items freely elected from elsewhere on this list or from one of
the attached ancillary lists
The list will be constructed in consultation with a member of the English Graduate Faculty who
agrees to serve as Chair of the student’s Examination Committee. Students who elect to focus on
Linguistics, Rhetoric and Composition, or Literary Theory are required to choose at least four of
their free electives from one of these sub-sections (see section J). These students will be assigned
an exam question specific to their chosen field in lieu of the explication question. Each
individualized list must be approved by the Graduate Program Committee by the last class day of
the semester preceding the semester in which the student intends to take the examination. In
normal circumstances, the individualized list may not be altered once approved by the Graduate
Program Committee.
A. Pre-1500
* 1)
2)
* 3)
4)
*5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12)
The Beowulf Poet, Beowulf
Anglo-Saxon Lyrics, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Wanderer,” “The
Seafarer,” “Wife’s Lament,” “Husband’s Message,” “The Battle of Maldon,” “The Ruin”
Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “General Prologue,” “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s
Prologue and Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “Clerk’s Prologue and Tale,”
“Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,” “Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale,” “Parson’s Prologue”
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman (B-Text)
Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (long version)
Middle English Lyrics and Ballads, “Sumer Is Icumin In,” “Western Wind,” “Man in the
Moon,” “Lenten is Come with Love to Town,” “I Sing of a Maiden,” “Alysoun,” “Jolly Jankyn,”
“The Smiths,” “Three Ravens,” “Twa Corbies,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” “A Geste of Robyn Hode”
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe
Sir Thomas Malory, from the Morte Darthur, “The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur
Saunz Guerdon” (Caxton’s Books 20 & 21)
Mystery plays, The Chester Play of Noah’s Flood and The Wakefield Second
Shepherds’ Play
Morality plays, Everyman and Mankind
Creation Narratives:
a) Biblical book of Genesis, chapters 1-11
b) Old English “Genesis B”
c) “The Iroquois Creation Story” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed.,
Vol. A
d) Pima Studies of the Creation and of the Flood in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature, 7th ed., Vol. A
B. 1500-1600
1)
2)
3)
*4)
5)
*6)
7)
8)
*9)
10)
11)
12)
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Sir Thomas Wyatt, “The long love that in my thought doth harbor,” “Whoso list to hunt,”
“Farewell, Love,” “My galley,” “They flee from me,” “My lute, awake!,” “Mine own John
Poins”
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, “The soote season,” “Love, that doth reign and live within my
thought,” “So cruel prison how could betide,” “Wyatt resteth here,” The Fourth Book of Virgil
(ll. 86-108)
Edmund Spenser, “October” (from The Shepheardes Calender), Amoretti 1, 34, 54, 64, 68, 75,
79, “Epithalamion”
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “A Letter of the Authors,” Book I (all), Book III
(Cantos 1, 5-6, 9-12)
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
a) Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy; Astrophil and Stella 1, 7, 9, 20, 29, 45, 106, Second
Song, Fourth Song
b) Queen Elizabeth I, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" and the "Golden Speech" (both are
available in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 1)
Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, “To the Angel Spirit of…Sidney,” Psalms 52
and 139, The Tragedie of Antonie
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest, Hamlet
William Shakespeare, One history play, one tragedy, and one comedy (including romance) of
student's selection (should consult with advisor)
William Shakespeare, Sonnets 1, 2, 18, 20, 64, 65, 66, 73, 116, 127, 129, 130, 135, 144; Rape
of Lucrece
Colonial Narratives:
a) Selections from "The Wider World" (Frobisher's Voyages to the Arctic; Drake's
Circumnavigation of the Globe; Amadas and Barlowe's Voyage to Virginia; and Hariot's Report
on Virginia) in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 1
b) Sir Walter Ralegh, selection from "The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of
Guiana," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 1
c) Christopher Columbus, “Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage,” “Letter
to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage (July 7, 1503), in The Norton Anthology
of American Literature, 7th ed., Vol. A
d) Bartolomé de las Casas, The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies, in The
Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed., Vol. A
e) Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación ("The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca"), in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed., Vol. A
f) John Smith, Selections in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed.,Vol. A
C. 1600-1700
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: Book I, The New Atlantis, from Essays: “Of
Truth,” “Of Great Place,” “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” “Of Plantations,” “Of Masques
and Triumphs”
*2)
John Donne, “The Flea,” “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star”), “The Canonization,” “A
Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “A Lecture upon the
Shadow,” “Twickenham Garden,” Elegy 19 (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”), Holy Sonnets 10
1)
(“Death Be Not Proud”), 14 (“Batter my heart”), and 17 (“Since she whom I loved”), “Good Friday,
1613. Riding Westward,” “Meditation 17” (from Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions)
3)
a) Ben Jonson, Volpone, The Masque of Blackness, “To Penshurst,” “To…Cary and …
Morison,” “To the Memory of…Shakespeare”
b) Aemilia Lanyer, "The Description of Cooke-ham"
4)
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry
5)
George Herbert, “Easter Wings,” “Jordan (1),” “Virtue,” “Jordan (2),” “The Collar,” “The
Pulley,” “A Wreath,” “Love (3),” “The Altar,” “The Sacrifice,” “Prayer (1),” “The Flower”
6)
John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “L’Allegro” & “Il Penseroso,” A
Masque [Comus], “Lycidas,” “How Soon Hath Time,” “When I Consider How My Light is
Spent,” “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint,” Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica
*7)
John Milton, Paradise Lost
8)
Andrew Marvell, “The Nymph Complaining…,” “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Definition
of Love,” “Bermudas,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” “The Garden,” “An
Horatian Ode,” “Upon Appleton House”
9)
William Congreve, The Way of the World
William Wycherly, The Country Wife
10)
John Dryden, “Absalom and Achithophel,” “MacFlecknoe,” “To the Memory of Mr.
Oldham, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
11) Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Author to Her Book,” “A
Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” “In Reference to Her
Children,” “ In
Memory of . . . Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “Some Verses upon the Burning of
Our House July 10th,
1666”
Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
(including “Preface to the Reader”)
*12) a) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover
b) Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World
D. 1700-1800
1)
*2)
3)
4)
*5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
a) Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, “Letters for Literary Ladies”
b) Charles Brockden Brown; Wieland; or The Transformation
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism,” “An Essay on Man,”
“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Ode on the Death of a Favorite
Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” “The Fatal
Sisters”
Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “To a Mouse,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “Epistle
to John Lapraik”
Samuel Johnson, “The Preface to Shakespeare,” from Lives of the Poets: “Pope,”
“Gray,” Rasselas
Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters
Sir Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers
Richard Sheridan, The Rivals
William Blake, “All Religions are One,” “There is No Natural Religion” [a and b]; from
Songs of Innocence: “Introduction,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney
*10)
11)
12)
Sweeper,” “Holy Thursday”; from Songs of Experience: “Introduction,” “Holy Thursday,” “The
Chimney Sweeper,” “The Sick Rose,” “The Tyger,” “London”
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of . . . George Whitefield,” “On Being Brought from
Africa to America,” “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” “To S.M., a
Young African Painter,” Letter to Rev. Samson Occom (Feb. 11, 1774)
Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic]”
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (to the year 1753), “Preface to Poor Richard, 1733,” “The
Way to Wealth,” “Information for Those Who Would Remove to America,” “Old Mistresses
Apologue,” “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” “On the Slave Trade”
Thomas Jefferson, Selections from Notes on the State of Virginia: Queries 6 (“Animals”), 8,
11, 14, 17-19
Samson Occom, “A Short Narrative of My Life,” “A Sermon [on Romans 6.23]”
Selections from the Cherokee Memorials [as selected in Norton Anthology]
E. 1800-c1850
1)
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher, "The Purloined Letter," "William
Wilson," "How to Write a Blackwood Article," “Romance” (alternatively, “Introduction,” II. 110, 35-45), "The Raven," "The Philosophy of Composition," "The Poetic Principle," and
the 1842
review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales
2)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
*3)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale
4)
a) Henry David Thoreau, Walden and “Civil Disobedience”
b) Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar; Divinity School Address
*5)
a) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
b) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl
c) Sojourner Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman? Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in
Akron, Ohio, 1851”
d) Frances E. W. Harper, “Ethiopia,” “An Appeal to my Country Women,” “Woman’s
Political Future.”
6)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
*7)
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Books I & XI, 1805 (not 1850) [Recommended text:
Norton Critical Edition The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth], “Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,”
“The Ruined Cottage,” Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
8)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus
9)
a) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
“Christabel,” “Kubla Khan”
b) George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 1
10)
John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Lamia,
“Bright star,” Selections from the Letters: “To Benjamin Bailey, (Nov. 22, 1817) [The
Authenticity of the Imagination],” “To George & Thomas Keats (Dec. 21, 27 [?], 1817)
[Negative Capability]”
11)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
12)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
F. c1850-1915
* 1)
2)
*3)
4)
5)
*6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12)
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain! My
Captain!” “In Paths Untrodden,” “When I Heard at the Close of the Day”
Emily Dickinson, [Recommended Text: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed.
Thomas H. Johnson. Little, Brown, 1955] “Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?” (Poem
248), “Over the fence—” (251), “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (280), “Some keep the
Sabbath going to church—” (324) “After great pain a formal feeling comes—” (341) “Much
Madness is divinest Sense” (435), “I was the slightest in the House—” (486), “They shut me
up in Prose—” (613), “I dwell in Possibility—” (657)
Henry James, “Daisy Miller,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “Turn of the Screw”
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “The Lady of Shalott”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “Andrea Del
Sarto,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and The Don
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig: Sketches From The Life Of A Free Black
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
G. 1915-1945
1)
*2)
3)
4)
*5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
*12)
13)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
The Waste Land
Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The
Short, Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” The Sun Also Rises
James Joyce, Ulysses
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School
Children,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “Byzantium,” “Sailing to Byzantium”
Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook,” “Design,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The
Oven Bird,” “Birches,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening,” “The Gift Outright”
Eugene O’Neill, Emperor Jones, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat,” Their Eyes Were Watching God
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “I Too,” “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” “America,” “The White House”
Alain Locke, “The New Negro”
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez
Richard Wright, Native Son
H. 1945-1968
1)
2)
*3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
* 9)
10)
11)
12)
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Jose Antonio Villareal, Pocho
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl: For Carl Solomon,” “Supermarket in California,” “America,” “In
the Baggage Room at Greyhound”
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
a) Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Blackberrying,” “The
Colossus,”
b) Theodore Roethke, “The Waking,” “I Knew a Woman,” “In a Dark Time,” “Root
Cellar,” “My Papa’s Waltz”
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything
That Rises Must Converge,” “The Artificial Nigger”
I. 1969-present
*1)
2)
3)
* 4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12)
13)
14)
15)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
a) Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed., Introduction and
Chapters 1-7
b) Lorna Dee Cervantes, from Emplumada, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” “Cannery Town in
August,” “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” “For Virginia Chavez,” “Poems for the
Young Man...,”
c) Cherrie Moraga, From The Last Generation “The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe”;
From: Loving in the War Years: “Loving in the War Years,” “La Güera,” “A Long Line of
Vendidas,” “Looking for the Insatiable Woman,” and “Out of our Revolutionary Minds
Toward a Pedagogy of Revolt”
Louise Erdrich, Tracks
Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck,” “Storm Warnings,” “Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw,” “I am in Danger---Sir--,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “For a Friend in
Travail”
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches
Tomas Rivera, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him
Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” “The Forge,” “Punishment,” “Casualty,” “The Skunk,” “The
Sharping Stone”
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Harold Pinter, The Homecoming
Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Philip Roth, American Pastoral: A Novel
V. Nabokov, Pale Fire
a) August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
b) David Mamet, Glengarry Glenross
J. ADDITIONAL LISTS
The following additional lists (Linguistics, Rhetoric and Composition, Literary Theory)
are intended to allow a student to prepare a field of study allied with literature. The
student may choose one of these additional lists and select from it four items—two required
(with stars) and two electives. These items will be the student’s four freely elected
works on his or her individualized reading list
Linguistics (Historical and Sociolinguistics)
*1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
*10)
11)
13)
Baugh, Albert & Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. Prentice Hall,
2002.
Coates, Jennifer. Women, Men and Language. 2nd ed. Longman, 1993.
Hock, Hans Henrich. Principles of Historical Linguistics. 2nd rev. ed. Mouton de
Gruyter, 1991.
Labov, William. Principles of Linguistic Change. Blackwell, 1994.
Labov, William. Sociolinguistic Patterns. U of Pennsylvania P, 1972.
Lanehart, Sonja, ed. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English
John Benjamins, 2001.
McMahon, April. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge UP. 1994.
Roca, Ana, ed. Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Issues and
Challenges. Cascadilla, 2000.
Thomason, Sarah G. Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh UP, 2001.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Mary Louise Pratt. Linguistics for Students of
Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Trudgill, Peter & Jenny Cheshire. 1998. The Sociolinguistics Reader. London /
New York: Arnold. Vol. 1: Multilingualism and Variation. Vol. 2: Gender and Discourse.
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation.
Blackwell, 1998.
RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
The student is responsible for category (1) and all of the readings in two (2) additional
categories under Theory and all of the readings in two (2) categories under Practice.
1) Plato, Phaedrus, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition:
Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Aristotle, from Rhetoric, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition:
Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Cicero, from De Oratory Book I, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical
Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Theory
2) Mikhail Bakhtin, from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce
Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed.
Boston/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Kenneth Burke, from A Rhetoric of Motives, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The
Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s,
2001.
Michel Foucault, from The Order of Discourse, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The
Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s,
2001.
3) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g), in
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times
to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s, 2001.
Kenneth A. Bruffee. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’”
Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Gloria Anzaldúa, from Borderlands/La Frontera, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The
Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston/St. Martin’s,
2001.
4) James Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk
in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Mike Rose, “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” Victor Villanueva,
ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Jacqueline Jones Royster, “A View from the Bridge: Afrafeminist Ideologies and Rhetorical
Studies,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, Gesa E. Kirsch, et al., eds.
Boston/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Shirley Wilson Logan, “’When and Where I Enter’: Race, Gender, and Composition Studies,” in
Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, Gesa E. Kirsch, et al., eds. Boston/St. Martin’s,
2003.
5) Gee, James Paul, “What is Literacy?” Teaching and Learning 2 (1987): 3-11.
Clifford, John. “The Subject is Discourse.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in
a Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991.
Paré, Anthony. “Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and Ideology”. The Rhetoric and
Ideology of Genre. Ed. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. Cresskill: Hampton P,
2002. 57-72.
Practice
1) Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,”
Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience
in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed.
Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Patrick Hartwell, “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” Victor Villanueva, ed.
Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Chris Anson, “Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology,”
Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
2) Ellen Cushman, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research,” Victor
Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Susan C. Jarratt, “Beside Ourselves: Rhetoric and Representation in Postcolonial Feminist
Writing,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, Gesa E. Kirsch, et al., eds.
Boston/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Min-Zhan Lu, “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone,”
Victor Villanueva, ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2nd ed. Urbana/NCTE, 2003.
Jonathon Mauk. “Location, Location, Location: The ‘Real’ (E)states of Being, Writing, and
Thinking in Composition.” College English 65.4 (2003): 368-388.
3) Jim W. Corder, What I Learned at School,” in Lisa Ede, ed. On Writing Research: The
Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Boston/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner, “Dispositions toward Language: Teacher Constructs of
Knowledge and the Ann Arbor Black English Case,” in Lisa Ede, ed. On Writing Research: The
Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Boston/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Mary P. Hiatt, “The Feminine Style: Theory and Fact,” in Lisa Ede, ed. On Writing Research: The
Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Boston/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Patricia Bizzell. “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses.” Alt/Dis:
Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Ed. Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia
Bizzell. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2002.
Literary Theory
All selections in numbers 1-10 are available in Vincent Leitch, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. The student is responsible for all of the readings in each
of two categories below (1-10) and all readings in the two anthologies that are starred (11 and 12).
1. FORMALISMS:
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The Metaphysical Poets”
Mikhail Bakhtin, From Discourse in the Novel
Roman Jakobson, From Linguistics and Poetics: “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of
Aphasic Disturbances,” “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”
Cleanth Brooks, From The Well Wrought Urn: “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” “The Formalist
Critics”
Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature”
2. STRUCTURALISM and SEMIOTICS
Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Tristes Tropiques: “A Writing Lesson”
Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” “The Return to Philology”
Ferdinand de Saussure, From Course in General Linguistics
Roland Barthes, From Mythologies: “Soap-powders and Detergents,” “The Brain of Einstein,”
“Photography and Electoral Appeal”; “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text”
Tzvetan Todorov, “Structural Analysis of Narrative”
3. PSYCHOANALYSIS
Sigmund Freud, From The Interpretation of Dreams: “The Material and Sources of Dreams,” “The
Dream-Work”; “The Uncanny,” “Fetishism”
Carl Gustav Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience”; from The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason, “The
Signification of the Phallus”
Julia Kristeva, From Revolution in Poetic Language: “The Semiotic and the Symbolic
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
4. MARXISMS
Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”; from Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses
Raymond Williams, From Marxism and Literature
Frederic Jameson, From The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act: Preface,
from “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act”; “Postmodernism and Consumer
Society”
5. DECONSTRUCTION, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, and POST-MODERNISM
Jacques Derrida, From Of Grammatology; from Dissemination
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, from Discipline and Punish; from The History of Sexuality
(vol. 1); from Truth and Power
Jean-François Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern”
Jean Baudrillard, From The Precession of Simulacra
bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”
6. FEMINISMS
Simone de Beauvoir, From The Second Sex
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, From The Madwoman in the Attic
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice,
and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism”
Susan Bordo, From Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body: “The Body and
the Reproduction of Femininity”
7. NEW HISTORICISM and CULTURAL STUDIES
Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”
Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Introduction to Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A
Vernacular Theory
8. CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” “What White Publishers Won’t Print”
Gerald Vizenor, From Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance: “Postindian
Warriors”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times”
Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
Gloria Anzaldúa, From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “La conciencia de la mestiza:
Towards a New Consciousness”
9. POST-COLONIAL STUDIES
Edward Said, From Orientalism
Frantz Fanon, From The Wretched of the Earth: from “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”;
and from “On National Culture”
Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, From A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (chapter 3 “History”
[Can the Subaltern Speak?])
Ngugi Wă Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba, “On the Abolition of
the English Department”
10. GENDER STUDIES and QUEER THEORY
Virginia Woolf, From A Room of One’s Own: [Shakespeare’s Sister, Chloe Liked Olivia,
Androgyny]
Adrienne Rich, From “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, From Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet
Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman”
Judith Butler, From Gender Trouble: Preface, “Subversive Bodily Acts”
11. READER RESPONSE THEORY
Aristotle, Poetics (p. 90)
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" (p.1387)
Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text" (p. 1470)
Wolfgang Iser, "Interaction Between Text and Reader" (p. 1673)
Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum" (p. 2071)
*12. Joseph Gibaldi. Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Language and
Literatures. 2nd ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992.
*13. Wilfred Guerin, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th ed.
New York: Oxford, 2005.
Reference: RECOMMENDED BUT NOT REQUIRED
Literary history:
Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000.
Hart, James David. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1995.
Handbook of critical terminology:
Harmon, William. A Handbook to Literature. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
2002.
Handbook of criticism and theory:
Guerin, Wilfrid, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2005.
History of the English language:
Baugh, Albert & Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. Prentice-Hall, 2001.
Rhetorical theory:
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.