(no subject)

Finally found the reading lists for the comprehensive exams, one pre-1700, one post - which are administered to 2nd year PhDs candidates here, not MAs, so I have to retake. Pretty predictable and mostly Norton-based, and mostly bits and bites, like lyrics and essays, but including a surprising number of book length works I haven't read through, falling into three categories:

Ones I feel guilty about: Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver's Travels, Great Expectations, Beloved, maybe More's Utopia

Ones I've avoided because I hate how they start or they don't sound terribly exciting: Joseph Andrews, Moll Flanders, Things Fall Apart, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Pamela (sigh), Book of Margery Kempe, Lydgate's Fall of Princes, Confessio Amantis, Piers Plowman (doubt many of us will be making it through these three), Oroonoko, The Blazing World

Ones I'm near totally ignorant of: Rushdie's Shame, Middleton's Roaring Girl and Chaste Maid of Cheapside, Lyly's Galathea, Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, The Book of John Mandeville

Two Middleton comedies! When there's only four Shakespeare plays on it.

The sole Canadian entry is Autobiography of Red.

(no subject)

Holy shit they make you do so little work here. I volunteered for extra just from gratitude - fifty longish papers dumped in November and March, fifty tests in December, thirty-five in April.

Books or midlength works I'll be reading this term, for classes or grading:

Franklin's Autobiography
The Last of the Mohicans
Nature
Song of Myself
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Waste Land: Facsimile and Transcript of Original Drafts
The Handmaid's Tale
Jackson's Dilemma


Much more next term, but nothing terribly long or difficult:

Letters from an American Farmer
Notes on the State of Virginia
Nature again
Walden
Whitman's Selected Civil War Poems
Benito Cereno
FD's Narrative again
Life in the Iron Mills
Huckleberry Finn
Child of the Ghetto
On the Banks of Plum Creek
The House of Mirth
O Pioneers!
Miss Lonelyhearts
The Great Gatsby
Frost's Selected Poems
Moore's Complete Poems
Bishop's Collected Poems
Native Son
Goodbye Columbus
Revolutionary Road
The Fire Next Time
Silent Spring
Dreams from My Father
An Inconvenient Truth
The Omnivore's Dilemma

And of course a bunch of theory and things, including an Agamben that sounds booklength.

Also choosing a book on Bishop or Moore to review - I've been needing to find Bishop's Animals for a while to see what percent of my claim's been jumped.

The Comps tests are mostly on British, but by summer I'll be welcoming the change anyway.