CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, STANISLAUS
Department of English
Library
Building, Room 195
801 W. Monte Vista Ave., Turlock, CA 95382
Telephone: 209-667-3361; Fax: 209-667-3720
THE CONCENTRATION IN LITERATURE (MA-LIT)
Students electing the
Literature Concentration must take ENGL 5000 and complete at least 27 more
units of applicable course work. Of these 27 units, at least 12 must be in
Literature courses numbered ENGL 5000 through ENGL 5999. Literature
students may apply no more than three units of each of the following (9 units
total) toward their MA degree: undergraduate courses, independent study (ENGL
5980) courses, and courses not offered by the English Department. Students not
completing 6 units of thesis must take 6 units of 5000-level literature
seminars.
Thesis and non-thesis
options: Students in the MA-LIT Concentration may elect either the thesis or
non-thesis option. Those planning to enter a doctoral program in English may
want to write a thesis; only students who maintain a grade point average of 3.5
or higher for the first 24 units of the Concentration may elect to write a
thesis. Students not eligible or not electing to write a thesis will instead
complete six further units of 5000-level literature seminars. A student
electing to write a thesis may take a maximum of six units of ENGL 5990
(Thesis) to meet MA course work requirements.
Students who have
completed six units of ENGL 5990, but not yet completed their theses, must
register for a unit through Extension to maintain University status and
privileges.
NOTE: Students
exercising the thesis option must submit a thesis prospectus at least one semester before signing up for ENGL 5990 Thesis. Students must
submit the completed theses or advanced projects at least four weeks prior to
the end of the semester targeted for graduation.
COMPREHENSIVE
EXAMINATIONS
Students in the LIT
concentration will be tested intensively on three periods of literature, of the
students’ choice. Each period is tested by a two-hour, on-campus exam. The
three exams must be taken during the same semester, but will not ordinarily be
administered all on the same day. Comprehensive exams ordinarily will be given only
during November and April. The committee bases the exams on the student's
reading list (see below).
The form of the exam
is at the discretion of the student's committee, but will emphasize essay
questions. For a student to pass an exam for any of the three periods requires
the unanimous consent of the student's committee. The student may retake the
exam for the particular period once with a new set of questions, should there
not be unanimous consent. Normally students in the LIT concentration should not
schedule exams in the same semester in which they plan to complete the thesis
or final project.
Grading
options for comprehensive examinations will be "no pass,"
"pass," and "high pass." Evaluation for the overall
examination may be designated as high pass by unanimous agreement of the
student’s examination committee.
M.A./ Lit. Core
Students will be
responsible for the core list in the three periods they have chosen as their focus.
Additionally, they will be responsible for ten more primary works in each of
those three periods; that additional list of works will be drawn up in
consultation with their thesis advisor or exam committee chair, with the
approval of the respective committees. Thus each student will be responsible
for 45 works (or, for poets, groups of selected poems).
BRITISH
Medieval:
Beowulf
Geoffrey Chaucer,
Selections from The
Miller's Tale,"
"The Wife of
Margery Kempe, The
Book of Margery Kempe
Gawain Poet, The
William Langland, Piers
Plowman (text A, passus 1,2,5,7,9)
Renaissance:
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil
and Stella
Edmund Spenser, The
Faerv Queene, Bk. 1
John Webster, The
Duchess of Malfi
Katherine Philips, Norton
Vol. I. *
Aemilia Lanyer, Norton
Vol I. *
John Milton,
*In effect for Spring ’08 exams, we will be using Susanne
Woods’s edition of The Poems of Aemilia
Lanyer instead of the selections from the Norton. At that time, we will also replace Katherine Philips with
Margaret Cavendish. We will be using the Penguin Classics edition of The Blazing World and Other Writings,
edited by Kate Lilley.
Enlightenment/18th
Century:
Aphra Behn, The
Rover
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's
Travels
Alexander Pope, An
Essay on Criticism
Fanny Burney, Evelina
James Boswell, Life
of Samuel Johnson
Nineteenth Century:
William Wordsworth, Lyrical
Ballads, 2nd. ed.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
George Gordon, Lord
Byron, Don Juan
Robert Browning, Men
and Women
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Twentieth Century:
Virginia Woolf, To
the Lighthouse
James Joyce, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
W.B. Yeats, Selected
Poems: "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Sailing to
Byzantium," "Among School
Children," "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," "Lapis
Lazuli," "Under Ben Bulben," "The Circus Animals'
Desertion"
Samuel Beckett, Waiting
for Godot
Philip Larkin.
Select 12 or more poems from either The Less Deceived or The
Whistsun Weddings.
AMERICAN
American Literature
until 1865:
Anne Bradstreet, The
Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
Frederick Douglass, Narrative
of the Life (1845 version)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
Scarlet Letter
Walt Whitman, Leaves
of Grass
American Literature
1865-1910:
Rebecca Harding Davis,
Life in the Iron Mills
Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Henr,v James, "The
Beast in the Jungle"
Frank Norris, McTeague
W.E.B. DuBois, The
Souls of Black Folk
American Literature
1910-Present:
T.S. Eliot, The
Langston Hughes,
Selected Poems: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Montage of a
Dream
Deferred,"
"The Weary Blues," "
John Steinbeck, The
Grapes of Wrath
Richard Wright, Native
Son
Maxine Hong Kingston, The
Woman Warrior
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