GENERAL INFORMATION

• Students must apply to take the Comprehensive Exam through the Brooklyn College Portal. Click eServices and Student Transactions.
• Students in the MA English Teacher program are required to pass a comprehensive examination. This three hour test is given twice a year, in the fall and spring semesters. Students entering the MA English program in Fall 2010 or thereafter are no longer required to pass a comprehensive examination.
  
• The exam is usually taken at the end of the final semester of coursework or in the semester following. To be eligible for the exam, MA English Teacher students must have completed, or be in the process of completing, 5 English courses. They must also have a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher and have resolved all incompletes in their courses.
  
• All students are encouraged to purchase the current edition of M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms and to use it in all their literature courses. The identification questions in Part I of the examination will be selected from this book.
  
• The exam tests students' knowledge in the following areas:
  knowledge of literary terms and historical concepts; understanding of major modern literary critical issues; ability to write a coherent essay in clear and lively style, free of grammatical errors.

LIST OF LITERARY TERMS FOR STUDY

Allegory
Alliteration
Augustan age
Blank verse
Canon of literature
Comedy
Courtly love
Chivalric romance
Cultural studies
Deconstruction
Dialogic criticism
Dramatic irony
Dream vision
Elegy
Enlightenment
Epic simile
Feminist Criticism
Formalism
Frame story
Free verse
Gothic novel
Great chain of being
Harlem Renaissance
Humanism
Irony
Marxism
Metaphor
Metaphysical poets
Meter
Modernism
Naturalism
Neoclassic
New Criticism
New Historicism
Old English period
Postcolonial studies
Postmodernism
Poststructuralism
Problem play
Prosody
Psychoanalytic criticism
Psychological criticism
Reader-response criticism
Realism
Reception theory
Renaissance
Restoration
Romantic
Satire
Semiotics
Seven deadly sins
Sonnet
Stream of consciousness
Structuralist criticism
Textual criticism
Tragedy
Transcendentalism in America

MA MODEL EXAMINATION

Read through the entire examination before beginning to write, and allocate your time carefully.

I. PART ONE tests your knowledge of literary terms, critical and theoretical approaches, and historical concepts. Choose five of the following fifteen terms, and write a single, well-developed paragraph on each one.

NOTE: The list of terms will be chosen from the current edition of A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams (Harcourt, Brace College Publishers).

PART TWO asks you to write two well-developed essays, based on several different courses you have taken. Answer two of the following questions. Reflect as much as possible what you have learned about various periods, topics, terms, and critical methods. Within your answer, DO NOT write two separate mini-essays on two separate periods or works. Each of your answers should be a unified essay drawing examples from more than one historical period.

A. Robert Southey once wrote to Charlotte Brontë, ″Literature is not the business of a woman's life, and it cannot be.″ His condescending point of view toward women raises broader questions about the role of women in the production and consumption of literature. Discuss two or three principal ways in which women writers and or readers have affected our responses to literature. Make specific reference to at least two works drawn from different periods, literary or critical, in developing your response.

B. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin posits that the novel comprises ″a plurality of independent unmerged voices,″ in other words different kinds of language, juxtaposed to emphasize that they are in a condition of conflict. Bakhtin's example is the novels of Dostoevsky, but the concept is far broader (Sidney's sonnets, The Canterbury Tales, plays of Shakespeare, Dickens's novels, Ulysses). Discuss the plurality of voices in two works (not necessarily novels) drawn from different periods.

C. An assumption may be made that the narrator of a work of fiction differs from the actual living author who wrote the work. The narrator may be an ″implied author,″ interested in and knowledgeable about the characters and events he or she reports on but not directly involved with them; or, at the other extreme, the narrator may be a character in the story with a definite purpose in telling the story as he or she wants to tell it. The narrator may, in short, express a wide range of relationships to the narrative.

Discuss the effect of narrative point of view on overall style, characterization, and theme, using as examples two works of fiction drawn from different periods that differ from one another in their narrative point of view, indicating the kind(s) of narrator(s) used in each work.

D. Ralph Ellison says in Shadow and Act that the mainstream of American culture is not the problem; it is that somebody has mystified the mainstream by obscuring the role of African-Americans. Any viable theory of a period of literary history obligates us to find which expressions, poems, plays, or fictions have been obscured and now must be uncovered. Where in literary history do you see literatures, populations, or modes of expression that have been marginalized? Explain.

E. You have encountered several modern critical approaches during your study for the Master of Arts degree (such as feminist, psychological, Marxist, and historical). We are interested in knowing how you move from an understanding of the theory to its practical application in the classroom. Discuss how you could integrate one or two modern critical approaches into the teaching of two texts drawn from two different historical periods.

CRITERIA FOR GRADING THE MA COMPREHENSIVE EXAM ESSAYS

1. Does the writer understand the critical issues raised by the question?
   
2. Is the writer familiar with other theoretical or critical texts than the one cited in the question?
   
3. Has the writer demonstrated breadth of knowledge of texts without becoming superficial?
   
4. Has the writer selected examples from more than one historical time period?
   
5. Is the essay coherent and organized?
   
6. Does the writer indicate the ability to pay close attention to details when analyzing texts?
   
7. Have all parts of the question been considered?
   
8. Are there a minimum of grammar and style problems?

TIPS FOR STUDENTS

• Take time to read the question carefully and understand what is being asked.
  
• Take time to plan your response, including the formulation of a proposition and at least a rough outline of the essay's principal parts and the chief examples you will use.
  
• Answer all parts of the question.
  
• It is not necessary to repeat the question, but be sure to address the issues raised and to place them in a theoretical context.
  
• Tie your examples to critical issues.
  
• Demonstrate understanding of key critical terms used in the question.
  
• One way to demonstrate breadth of knowledge of texts is to construct a paragraph that presents a series of examples.
  
• Be sure to discuss at least two texts (from two different historical periods) in some detail.
  
• Avoid vague language and broad, unsupported generalizations.
  
• Avoid retelling stories, plots, or narratives.
• And don't forget to purchase the current edition of M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms. As stated above, the identification questions in Part I of the examination will be selected from this book.