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If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. ~ Adlai Stevenson

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

This should keep me busy for a while...

Part of the Master's program I am starting in the fall is the requirement that I take the college's version of the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) in literature. And so I have a reading list to finish by the end of 2013's summer session. I have read a fair bit of this list in the past, but I think I should re-read those that I am familiar with already. Ready? Here it is in all its glory...

British (All MA candidates): 
  • Chaucer: from The Canterbury Tales: "General Prologue" and Prologue and Tales told by the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Nun's Priest 
  • Shakespeare: Othello, Merchant of Venice 
  • Spenser: Book I of Fairie Queene 
  • Milton: Books 1, 2, and 9 from Paradise Lost 
  • Swift: from Gulliver's Travels, Book 4: "Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms" 
  • Pope: Epistle I from "An Essay on Man" 
  • Austen: Emma 
  • Blake: "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Little Vagabond," "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper" (both from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).
  • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein 
  • Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear" 
  • Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey" and "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" 
  • Shelley: "Ode to the West Wind" and "Defense of Poetry" 
  • Browning: "Andrea Del Sarto" 
  • Rossetti: "In an Artist's Studio" and "Winter my Secret" 
  • Hardy: Jude the Obscure
  • G. M. Hopkins: "God's Grandeur" and "Pied Beauty" 
  • Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse 
  • James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
     
American (All MA candidates): 
  • Selected poetry: 
    • Anne Bradstreet, "The Prologue To Her Book," "Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of our House," "The Flesh and the Spirit," "The Author to Her Book" and Phyllis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," "To his Excellency G. Washington," "On Imagination" 
    • Dickinson: selections (numbers as listed in Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of ED):
      49, 106, 165, 173, 178, 181, 216, 255, 258, 371, 426, 974, 985, 994, 84, 106, 175, 184, 185, 193, 204, 216, 280, 299, 1036, 1071, 1056, 1116, 70, 124, 185, 186, 230, 252, 284, 302, 319, 521, 1184, 1219
  •  Whitman: Leaves of Grass
  • Thoreau: Walden, "Resistance to Civil Government" 
  • Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappacini's Daughter," "The Birth-mark" 
  • Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 
  • Melville: The Piazza Tales:
    •       The Piazza
    •       Bartleby, The Scrivener
    •       Benito Cereno
    •       The Lightning-Rod Man
    •       The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles
    •       The Bell-Tower
  • Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom 
  • Ellison: Invisible Man 
  • Roth: Call It Sleep  

Selected poetry, modern and contemporary (students can find most of these works online): 

Modernist Poetry:
  • Wm. C. Williams:—“Spring and All,” entire work, parts I-XXVIII; “Young Sycamore,” “Paterson: the Falls,” and “The Dance"
  • Pound—“Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Canto I,” “Canto XIV,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “Sestina: Altaforte”
  • Eliot—“The Four Quartets,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
    H.D.-- “’Sea Rose,” “Chance Meeting,” “White World,’ “Phaedra,” “The Shepherd,” “A Dead Priestess Speaks”
  • Gertrude Stein—Tender Buttons
  • Mina Loy—“Lunar Baedeker,” “Moreover, the Moon” 
Contemporary Poetry:
  • Lyn Hejinian-- My Life
  • John Ashbery—“Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror”
  • Robert Creeley—“Something,” “Words,” “The Finger,” “The Act of Love,” “The Pattern,” “The Language,” “Distance”
  • George Oppen— “The Forms of Love,” “Boy’s Room,” “Of Being Numerous”
  • Alice Notley— from The Descent of Alette: [“a car” “awash with blood,”] [“I stood waiting”], [“I walked into”], [“Presently”], [“The water, of the river”], and “At Night the States”
  • Yusef Komunyakaa- “Facing It,” “My Father’s Love Letters,” “Believing in Iron”
For students in rhetoric/pedagogy/literacy: 
From Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, Cushman, Kingten, Kroll & Rose (Eds.)
  • Harvey Graff, "The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times" 
  • Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, "Unpackaging Literacy" 
  • Luis Moll and Norma Gonzalez, "Lessons from Research with Language Minority Students" 
  • Shirley Brice Heath, "Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions" Deborah Brandt, "Sponsors of Literacy" 
  • David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University" 
  • James Paul Gee, "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction" and "What is Literacy?" 
  • Lisa Delpit, "The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse"
From Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, Villanueva, V. (Ed.) 
  • Mina Shaugnessy, “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” 
  • James Berlin, “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories” 
  • Mike Rose, "Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism" 
  • Patricia Bizzell, "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing" Victor Villanueva, "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism"
So, you think that might keep me busy for a while? Many of the classics I found free for my Kindle already, at least the British classics. I haven't gotten any further than that yet!

3 comments:

  1. Oh yeah, that'll definitely keep you busy;). Fun times, but very busy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This list makes me giddy. I love Hawthorne's The Birthmark and Rappacini's Daughter. Two of my all-time favorite short stories!

    ReplyDelete
  3. And what will you read in your spare time? ; )

    ReplyDelete

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Emerson

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