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MA Examination Description, Sample, and List of Approved Works

There is one examination time for all MA students: January in the second year.  Mary Udal and the graduate director, Greg Semenza, are responsible for “proctoring” the exam.  Students who fail the exam must retake it at a scheduled make-up in late May.  Since the examination is taken after MA students have applied for the PhD program, acceptance letters will make clear that students can only be admitted to the PhD program once they pass the MA examination (or the make-up). 

Each examination list is good for three years, after which time the examination committee is responsible for making all necessary changes.  The lists will be available at all times to MA students and faculty members. 

Students are not allowed to bring books into the examination room.  They are permitted to bring in a copy of their list, however.

This is a six-hour examination, though students may choose to take less time.  The morning session centers on Sections 1 and 2 and lasts 3 hours (9AM – 12 PM).  There is a lunch break between noon and 1:00 PM.  The afternoon session centers on Sections 3 and 4 and also lasts 3 hours (1:00-4:00).  Whereas the morning session is organized around close-reading, the afternoon session tests analytical skills more widely. 

Each exam is read by two members of the Examination committee, who award it a grade of “high pass,” “pass,” “low pass,” or “fail”.  If the readers split, a third reader from the committee is to be consulted.  All final grade decisions are made by the committee. 

Section 1: Close reading of Poetry or Prose: (1.5 hours).  Please offer a thorough analysis and explanation of one of the following two excerpts: It will be important for the committee to remember that “close reading” might be interpreted in very different ways by different readers.  The term might mean either close historical, formalist, or thematic reading, for instance.   The key is that students must show an ability to analyze carefully and in a sophisticated manner the specific text that they are given.

A)        Sample: “The Folly of Being Comforted.”  William Butler Yeats.
           
B)        Sample: Sonnet 67 of the Amoretti.  Edmund Spenser.
           

Section 2: Close reading of Criticism: (1.5 hours).  Choose A or B.  Please offer a thorough analysis and explanation of one of the following two excerpts and then explain the usefulness of the writer’s argument in relation to a work on your list.  The committee must provide excerpts of criticism from the chosen theory reader on the MA Examination List (for this three-year cycle, the entries are from Criticism: Major Statements, 4th ed., ed. Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson [Bedford St. Martin’s, 2000]). 

A)        Sample: Aristotle on “catharsis.”

B)        Sample: Stanley Fish on reader-response.
           

LUNCH BREAK

Section 3: Period-Based Question: (1.5 hours).  Choose A or B.  Please answer one of the following questions.  Your answer should involve analysis of at least three relevant texts from your list.  Questions will require students to demonstrate a) a sense of the historical uniqueness of certain literary movements, styles, or themes; b) an ability to analyze multiple texts in relation to the historical factors that influenced and are influenced by them; and c) an ability to analyze how texts speak to one another synchronically. 

A)        Sample: The centuries during which the medieval and Renaissance works on your list were created also witnessed religious turmoil and transformation: one might think of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century critiques of corruption in the Church, and the break of the Church of England from Roman Catholicism.  Analyzing at least three relevant works from your list, write a focused essay that considers some part of the relationship between religion and literature during these periods.  You may choose to limit your response to either medieval or Renaissance works, although an answer on related developments from each period would also be appropriate.

B)        Sample: The long nineteenth century (1790-1899) encompasses what are typically viewed as three literary periods: Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian. Extending the nineteenth century backward by one decade permits including the French revolution as a crucial historical matrix for subsequent literary production. The early decades of the nineteenth century are often viewed as encompassing the potential for revolution in Great Britain, as seen in the Reform Act (1832) and the Chartist movement (1832-1848). However, despite revolutions breaking out in many European countries in 1848, Great Britain avoided a popular revolution, for reasons that historians have been debating ever since.

     If we identify the long nineteenth century as a period when the possibility of revolution was vividly present through 1848, then Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) can be viewed not only as a pivotal work between the Romantic and Victorian periods, but also as a work that takes up the issue of how a society responds to threats of violence or revolution resulting from various forms of social and political injustice and inequality. Focusing on an analysis of Wuthering Heights in relation to at least one Romantic and one Victorian work on your list, discuss the representation of violent versus non-violent responses to injustice. Your essay may draw on the categories of class, gender, or kinship, or discuss references to the French revolution, or you may also consider to what extent each work proposes literature itself as a possible means to influence social or political change.

Section 4: Trans-Historical Question: (1.5 hours).  Choose A or B.  Your answer should include analysis of four relevant texts from your list.  Please discuss at least one pre- and one post-1800 text.  Questions will define “genre” somewhat loosely as referring to everything from traditional literary categories such as “Romance” to thematically linked texts (i.e., wartime literature) to broad categories like “drama” and “lyric poetry.”  The point is that students must now demonstrate an ability to analyze how texts speak to one another diachronically.

A)        Sample: While drama is often considered within the physical space of the theater and thus apart from other literary forms, it is also very much a part of the literary and historical context that produced works of fiction and poetry. Choose two plays from your list, one from before 1800 and one from after 1800, and place them in the context of  literary, historical and/or social change, using at least two other non-dramatic works from your list as points of reference. Specific topics could include: historical events such as the Restoration of Charles II or the first World War; social issues such as the growth of the middle class; or literary and philosophical movements such as Humanism or Existentialism. Your essay should consider evolutions in form and/or characterization as well as social and/or historical developments. If appropriate, you may wish to discuss how issues of performance, such as staging, reflect these concerns.

B.         Sample: Allusions to the individual permeate the works on your reading list. What is an individual? And how does literature reflect the emergence of this modern concept? Individualism is considered a defining theme of  American literature. It is also the concept tied most closely to the Protestant origins of capitalism and the rise of the novel as a  genre. The individual is a symbol of progress in the culture of imperialism and a contested symbol in the resistance literature that emerged against imperial culture. In what context(s) do the texts from your list frame the individual? Discuss 4 authors from your list making sure you draw from both sides of the Atlantic, with at least one pre 1800 and one post 1800 author.

Official MA EXAMINATION LIST (2010-2012)

1. Anon., Beowulf , trans. Liuzza (Broadview Literary Texts)

2. Chaucer, Selected The Canterbury Tales

“General Prologue”

“Man of Law's Tale”

“The Wife of Bath's Tale”

“The Clerk's Tale”

“Franklin's Tale”

“The Pardoner's Tale”

“The Prioress' Tale”

“The Nun's Priest's Tale”

Retraction”

3. The Wakefield Master

1. Mactacio Abel

2. Processus Noe Cum Filiis

3. Prima Pastorum

4. Secunda Pastorum

5. Magnus Herodes

6. Coliphizacio

4. The Book of Margery Kempe , Lynn Staley, ed. TEAMS Middle English Text Series.

Kalamazoo, 1996. (online at www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/staley.htm )

BOOK ONE

The Proem

Chapters 1-3, 11, 13, 15, 18, 28-30, 36, 50-52, 59

BOOK TWO

Chapters 1-10

5. Malory, “The Morte Arthur,” from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory , ed. Vinaver

6. Spenser, The Faerie Queene , The “Letter to Ralegh” and Book 3

7. Marlowe, Dr. Faustus , A Text

8. Shakespeare, Othello

9. Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle

10. Herbert, The Temple

11. Milton, Paradise Lost

12. Behn, Oroonoko

13. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

14. Pope, Selected Poems and Prose

"Essay on Criticism"

"The Rape of the Lock"

"An Essay on Man" Epistle I

"An Essay on Man" Epistle IV

Moral Essays: Epistle II: To a Lady

The Dunciad , Book I

15. Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer

16. Swift, Gulliver's Travels

17. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Norton, 6 th ed., excerpts)

18. Wordsworth, Selected Poems (ed., Duncan Wu recommended)

Ruined Cottage

“Tintern Abbey”

“Two-Part Prelude [1799]”

“There was a boy...”

“Nutting”

“Glad Preamble” to Prelude (1805)

“Resolution and Independence”

“The World Is too Much with Us”

“Westminster Bridge”

“It is a Beauteous Evening”

“1 September 1802”

“London 1802”

“Great Men...”

“Ode. Intimations of Immortality”

“Elegiac Stanzas”

“The Solitary Reaper”

Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)

19. Keats, Selected Poems and Letters (ed., Duncan Wu)

“On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”

            “Addressed to Haydon”

            “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”

            “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”

            “When I have fears that I may cease to be”

“The Eve of St Agnes”

“Belle Dame Sans Merci”

“Ode to Psyche”

“Ode to a Nightingale”

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

“Ode on Melancholy”

“Ode on Indolence”

Lamia

“To Autumn”

The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream

Selected letters (in Wu)

20. Austen, Pride and Prejudice

21. Darwin, Excerpts from On the Origin of the Species and The Descent (From Darwin ,

3rd edition, ed. Appleman [2001])

22. Dickens, Hard Times

23. Browning, (Norton Anthology II 8 th Edition Selections)

24. Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

25. Rossetti, (Norton Anthology II 8 th Edition Selections)

26. Yeats, Selected Poems and Plays

“No Second Troy”

“September 1913”

“The Magi”

“The Wild Swans at Coole”

“The Second Coming”

“Easter 1916”

“A Prayer for My Daughter”

“Sailing to Byzantium”

“Leda and the Swan”

“Lapis Lazuli”

“The Circus Animals' Desertion”

Cathleen Ní Houlihan

27. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

28. Woolf, A Room of One's Own

29. Eliot, Selected Poems (Recommended Helen Vendler, ed. The Wasteland and other

Poems )

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“The Waste Land”

“The Hollow Men”

“Ash-Wednesday”

30. Auden, (Norton Anthology II 8 th Edition Selections)

31. Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

32. Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

33. Wheatley, (Norton Anthology American 7 th ed. Shorter [2 vols.] Selections)
34. Cooper, The Pioneers

35. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
36. Melville, Moby-Dick

37. James, The Portrait of a Lady
38. Dickinson, (Norton Anthology American 7 th ed. Shorter [2 vols.] Selections)
39. Whitman,

Preface to Leaves of Grass

“Song of Myself”

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

“Drum-Taps”

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd”

40. Frost, (Norton Anthology American 7 th ed. Selections)
41. Faulkner, Light in August
42. Stevens, (Norton Anthology American 7 th ed. Selections)
43. Miller, Death of a Salesman

44. Morrison, Beloved

45. Kingston, The Woman Warrior

46. Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

47. Desai, Clear Light of Day

48. Emecheta, Joys of Motherhood

49. Fugard, Blood Knot

50. Wa Thiong'o, Grain of Wheat

51. Brathwaite, Masks

52. Essays in Theory:

From Criticism: Major Statements , 4 th ed., ed. Charles Kaplan and William

Davis Anderson (Bedford St. Martin's, 2000).

Aristotle

Longinus

Dante

Sidney

Dryden

Shelley

Marx

Nietzsche

Freud

Barthes

Derrida

Foucault

Fish

Greenblatt

Gates, Jr.

Sedgwick

Bhabha

Landow

Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”

Bartholomae, “Inventing the University”

 

 

 

 

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