Orals Proposals

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ORALS READING LISTS

The lists on this page include guidelines from faculty (though few now appear, more will be added in the near future) and examples from students' proposals (these, too, will be supplemented). Recent revisions in the graduate program mean that many of these examples do not exactly represent current policies; in any case, the lists are meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, constituting points of reference rather than sets of templates. Full details about orals proposals and field lists.

In brief, the proposal begins with 1-2 paragraphs laying out the overall logic of the three fields (examples appear below under "Overviews"). Each field also includes a short rationale for the selected texts, as well as a representative secondary bibliography (these elements appear in many, but not all, of the samples below; in some samples, the rationales are far more detailed, or the secondary bibliographies more extensive, than they need be). Summary description of the three fields.

A note about terminology: the program now refers to a general field, a related field, and a thesis field (or second related field). Because the following lists are detached from context of the original full proposal, this page retains the older rubrics, categorizing the lists as major and minor fields.

Also note: fields that cross several centuries or that pretty much evenly straddle two centuries are listed under Special Topics.

Medieval

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS
Forthcoming

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	Vernacular Theological & Exemplary Works in English, 1350-1450
	Markets, Theatres, Cultures 1350-1650
	Late Medieval Urban Devotion
	Literature & Political Life in England c. 1370-1600
	History and Time in 14th and 15th Century Texts (1377-1483)

Minor Field	Piers Plowman
	Chaucer
	Chaucer and Performance
	Chaucer and Narrative
	Malory in Context
	Christine de Pizan
	Richardian Literature and its Afterlives
	Romance and the Questions of Gender and 'Race'
	Medieval Drama
	Medieval Hermeneutics and Practices of Reading

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Renaissance

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS
Forthcoming

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	Early Modern English Drama
	Tudor-Stuart Drama
	Tudor-Stuart Drama (2)
	English Poets of the Earlier 17th Century

Minor Field	Shakespeare
	Early Modern Women Writers
	The London Book Trade, 1500-1650
	British History, 1603-1642
	The Historical Phenomenology of Written Communication

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Eighteenth Century & Romanticism

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS

Major Field	Guidelines for Restoration and 18th-century topics (Davidson)
	Romanticism 1780-1830 (Gray)

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	The Eighteenth Century 1660-1800
	English Romantic Poetry and Prose

Minor Field	18th-century British Literature
	18th-century Satire
	18th-century Semiotics and Aesthetics
	English Romanticism

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Nineteenth Century

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS

Major Field	Victorian Reading List (Marcus)

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	Victorian Literature
	19th-century British Novel
	The Victorian Novel
	19th-century Fiction
	The European Bildungsroman
	The 19c Novel in France & England and the Discourses of Urbanism
	India and Ireland in the Colonial World

Minor Field	Victorian Poetry
	Comparative Realisms: Theory and Practice
	Religious Thought in Nineteenth-Century England
	Dandyism in 19th-century French & British Literature

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Twentieth Century

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS

Major Field	Modern British Literature (Stade, emeritus)

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	British Modernism
	20th-century Poetry: Interdependent Modernisms
	Aesthetics, Politics, and the Modern European Novel (1869-1989)
	Decadence, Aestheticism, and The Rise of Modernism
	Sexuality, War and Fascism in Modern Literature
	Comparative Modernist Texts
	Imperial Modernism
	20th-century Literatures: Colonialism Through Postcolonialism
	Magic Realism
	The Global Imaginary Since 1945
	Postmodern Satire, Encyclopedism, and the Poetic of Excess

Minor Field	British Modernism
	The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
	The Novels and Essays of Virginia Woolf
	20th-century Experimental Fictions
	20th-century Fantastic Literature
	Modernist "Crisis"
	Modernist Women Writers
	Mapping Nation and Other Communities
	20th-century Texts: Time, Narrative and the Modern
	The Contemporary Indian Novel
	Caribbean Fiction by Women
	Contemporary Transnational Literature

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American

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS

Major Field	American Literature, 1940 to the Present (Adams)


STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	American Literature from the Revolution to the Civil War
	American Literature from Revolution to Renaissance
	Literature of the American Frontier
	American Literature, 1814-1929
	American Literature 1850-1950
	Twentieth-century American Poetry
	American Literature 1920-2000
	African American Literature Beginnings to Present
	American Modernism and Hollywood Genre Film

Minor Field	19th-century American Literature
	American Literature from 1830 to the Turn of the Century
	Walt Whitman: The Americanization of Romanticism
	Herman Melville
	U.S. Literature 1922-1939
	American Hard-boiled and Noir Crime Fiction, 1920-1960
	Contemporary Native American Novels
	The American Epic
	Queer Poetry in 20th-century America
	Black Women and Their Fictions in the 20th Century
	Asian American Transnational History 1850-1950
	Racial Passing and Masquerade in American Culture
	Latin American and U.S. Latino Literatures

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Theory

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS
Forthcoming

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

Minor Field	Narrative Theory
	Frankfurt School Theorists and Their Interlocutors
	Theories of Self and Desire (Psychoanalysis)
	Structuralism and Poststructuralism
	Feminism and Material Culture
	Theories and Practices of Reading

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Theater

[see also Medieval, Renaissance, & 18th Century fields for theater topics]

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS
Forthcoming

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	Modern Drama: Dehumanized Protagonists & Corrupt Society
	Modern / Contemporary Drama and Film
	The European Avant Garde: Artaud, Brecht, and Genet

Minor Field	Virtual Theater
	Theater about the Theater
	American Performance 1787-1992
	French Classicist Drama
	Topics in Greek Tragedy

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Special Topics

FACULTY SUGGESTIONS

Minor Field	Poetry and Poetics (Gray)

STUDENT SAMPLES

Major Field	The Novel: From Realism to Modernism
	Theories of History / Modern & Contemporary Drama

Minor Field	Turn-of-the-Century Realism
	Modern Moral and Ethical Theories
	Genre Fusion: Theater and the Novel
	Literary Ecology
	"Englishness" and "Jewishness"
	Masculinity

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Sample Overviews / Rationales for the 3 Chosen Fields


Overview 1:	Markets, Theatres, Cultures 1350-1650 Richardian Literature and its Afterlives Romance and the Questions of Gender and 'Race'

Overview 2:	Tudor-Stuart Drama The London Book Trade, 1500-1650 British History, 1603-1642

Overview 3:	Victorian Literature "Englishness" and "Jewishness" British Modernism

Overview 4:	American Literature, 1814-1929 American Performance, 1787-1992 Masculinity

Overview 5:	20th-century Poetry: Interdependent Modernisms English Romanticism The Novels and Essays of Virginia Woolf

Overview 6:	India and Ireland in the Colonial World The Poetry of William Butler Yeats The Contemporary Indian Novel

Overview 7:	American Literature 1850-1950 Asian American Transnational History 1850-1945 Modernist Subjectivity Between Empire and the Oriental Metropolis

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Other Resources

The following university sites post orals lists, which may be of some use in formulating fields:

	http://www.english.ucla.edu/graduate/reading_list/index.html
	http://www.english.ucsb.edu/grad/handbook/reading-lists-toc.asp
	http://www.engl.virginia.edu/graduatestudents/oralsonline/index.html
	http://students.missouri.edu/~egsa/lists/index.html

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