Sample Reading Lists

FICTION

(1) 18th and 19th Century English

at least three of the following authors:

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Bleak House
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge

at least one of the following:

Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South, Wives and Daughters
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

(2) 20th Century "English"

one work by each of the following:

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, Victory, Heart of Darkness
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and stories
James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway

at least three of the following:

Samuel Beckett: Watt, Malloy
Anita Brookner: Look at Me, Hotel du Lac
Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh
J. M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians
Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier
E. M. Forster: Howards End, Passage to India
William Golding; Lord of the Flies
Nadine Gordimer: Burger's Daughter, July's Children
Graham Greene: Brighton Rock
Aldous Huxley: Point Counterpoint, Brave New World
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, Martha Quest
Malcom Lowry: Under the Volcano
Iris Murdoch: The Sand Castle, The Italian Girl
V. S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River
Edna O'Brien: The Country Girls Trilogy
Frank O'Connor: stories
George Orwell: 1984, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Jean Rhys: Quartet, Good Morning, Midnight!
Muriel Spark: Memento Mori
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One

(3) Early American

all of the following:

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and stories
Herman Melville: Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener
E. A. Poe: stories
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn

(4) 20th Century American

one work by each of the following:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, In Our Time (stories)
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying
Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Flannery O'Connor: Wise Blood, Everything that Rises Must Converge (stories)

at least three of the following:

Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg Ohio
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Willa Cather: The Professor's House, My Antonia
Stephen Crane: Red Badge of Courage and stories
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy
John Dos Passos: U. S. A.
Zora N. Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street, Babbitt
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn
Katherine Anne Porter: stories
Gertrude Stein: Three Lives
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Eudora Welty: stories
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward Angel
Richard Wright: Native Son

(5) Later 20th Century American

at least five of the following:

Margaret Atwood: Edible Woman, Life Before Man
James Baldwin: Go Tell it on the Mountain
John Barth: The End of the Road, Lost in the Funhouse (stories)
Donald Barthelme: stories: "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts"; Sadness
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (stories)
Robert Coover: Pricksongs & Descant (stories), Spranking the Maid
Don DeLillo: White Noise, Mao 11
Richard Ford: Wildlife, Rock Springs (stories)
William H. Gass: In the Heart of the Heart (stories)
William Gaddis: The Recognitions, Carpenter's Gothic
John Hawkes: The Lime Twig, Death, Sleep & theTraveler
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Charles Johnson: Middle Passage
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Jerzy Kosinski: The Painted Bird
Bernard Malamud: The Natural, The Assistant, stories
Norman Mailer: An American Dream, Deer Park
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, Beloved
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Despair
Joyce Carol Oates: The Wheel of Love (stories)
Tillie Olsen: Tell Me a Riddle (stories)
Grace Paley: stories: The Little Disturbances of Man, Later the Same Day
Thomas Pynchon: V, Crying of Lot 49
Phillip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer
Ishmael Reed: The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Mumbo-Jumbo
J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories
L. B. Singer: stories
John Updike: Rabbit Run
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Slaughterhouse Five

(6) Europeans & Others

one work by each of the following:

Anton Chekov: stories
Franz Kafka: The Trial, The Metamorphosis and other stories
Albert Camus: The Stranger, The Plague

at least two of the following:

Honoré Balzac: Pere Goriot, Droll Tales
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov, Crime& Punishment
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Guy de Maupassant: stories
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina, War and Peace
Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
Voltaire: Candide
Emile Zola: The Human Beast, Nana

at least three of the following:

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Isaac Babel: stories
Jorge Luis Borges: stories
Tadeusz Borowski: This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen
Simone de Beauvoir: The Mandarins
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night aTraveler
Louis Ferdinand Céline: Death on the Installment Plan, Journey to the End of Night
Colette: Cheri, Ripening Seed
Marguerite Duras: Moderato Contabile, The Lover
Carlos Fuentes: A Change of Skin
Jean Genet: Our Lady of the Flowers
André Gide: The Counterfeiters, Lafcadio's Adventures
Günter Grass: The Tin Drum
Peter Handke: The Left-Handed Woman
Herman Hesse: Steppenwolf
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, The Farewell Party
Violet Leduc: La Batarde, The Taxi
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, Stories of Three Decades
Gabriel García Márquez: A Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera
Robert Musil: The Man without Qualities
Cees Nooteboom: Rituals
Marcel Proust: Rememberance of Things Past (Swann's Way)
Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
Alain Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy, The Voyeur
Natatlie Sarraute: Tropisms
Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea
Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles
Italo Svevo: Confessions of Zeno

PLAYWRITING

MODERN

Ibsen: The Master Builder, The Wild Duck, A Doll's House,
Hedda Gabler
Chekov: Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull
Strindberg: Dance of Death, Ghost Sonata, The Father, Miss Julie
Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV
Genet: The Balcony, The Maids
Brecht: The Good Woman of Setzuan, Puntilla Arturo Ui, The Caucasion Chalk Circle
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Shaw: Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, Mrs. Warren's Profession
O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night, Desire Under the Elms,
The Iceman Cometh. Hairy Ape
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Tin Roof,
The Glass Menagerie
Odets: Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing
Miller. Death of a Salesman, The Price
Pinter: Homecoming, The Birthday Party
Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame
Ionesco: The Bald Soprano, The Chairs
Shepard: The Curse of the Starving Class
Synge: Playboy of the Western World
Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party
Albee: Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
O'Casey: Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock
Gelber: The Connection, Sleep
L. Wilson: The Gingham Dog, Hot L Baltimore

GREEK

Sophocles: Oedipus series
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes

ROMAN

Plautus: The Menaechmi
Terrence: The Brothers
Seneca: Medea

ELIZABETHAN

Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure,
Twelfth Night
Janson: Volpone
Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Ford: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

RESTORATION

Dryden: All for Love
Otway: Venice Preserved
Farquhar: The Beaux' Stratagem
Moliere: The School for Wives, The Miser

CRITICAL TEXTS

Francis Fergusson: The Idea of Theatre
Albert Bermel: Contradictory Characters
Eric Bentley: The Lite of the Drama
Artaud: The Theatre and its Double
Peter Brook: The Empty Space

Poetry

All students entering the program are required to possess and refer to the following five books:

1) Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed., unabridged — a traditional survey of American, British, "colonial" and "postcolonial" anglophone poetry from its beginnings to the present.

2 and 3) Rothenberg and Joris, eds., Poems for the Millennium, vols. 1 and 2 (U. Cal. 1995, 1998)— a wide-ranging and eclectic two-volume anthology of international modernist and post-modernist poetry and poetics.

4) Preminger and Bogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, unabridged (PUP/U. Cal) — a valuable resource including references to technical terms (such as, anapest, antanclasis, clerihew, metaphor, sonnet, tanka, zejel, zuegma), poetic movements (such as, blues, imagism, language poetry, Ouhpo, romanticism surrealism), ethnic and national poetries (such as, American, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Indian, Swedish, Yiddish).

5) Leitch, Cain, et al., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), a comprehensive survey of theory and criticism from the ancient Greeks to the present.

All five books should be consulted to prepare for the Comprehensive Examination. Also, the examination will assume familiarity with the poetry, poets, concepts covered in workshops and tutorials as well as such standard critical texts as: Aristotle, The Poetics, Sidney, "An Apologie for Poetrie"; Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry"; Poe, "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"; Wordsworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"; Whitman, "1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass"; Arnold, "The Study of Poetry"; Pound, "A Retrospect"; Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and "Hamlet and His Problems"; Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"; Stein, "Narration: Lecture 2"; Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"; Olson, "Projective Verse"; and Robert Hass, "Listening and Making."

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