Department of English Language and Literature : Master of Arts: Literature Concentration

Master of Arts Written Exam

**The next exam will be offered Saturday, July 12, 2008, 9 AM.**

ONLY those students who began their studies PRIOR to Fall 2008 may elect to take this exam (in conjunction with the Old MA Paper).

Purpose of the Examination 

The examination requires the candidate to become conversant about 33 texts of English and American literature. The reading list is not meant to be definitive or comprehensive, nor is the exam mean to serve as a “capstone” experience. Preparing for the exam should provide students with an opportunity to fill in gaps in their knowledge; taking the exam should provide students an opportunity to demonstrate reading competence outside of the classroom setting.

Applying to Take the Exam

After completion of 18 graduate hours in English, a student may apply to take the MA Exam. The exam candidate should have completed the foreign language requirement, and have removed from his/her graduate record all Incomplete and Progress grades. At least three weeks before the date of the examination, you must inform the graduate studies advisor of your intent to take the exam and specify the text you've chosen for Part 2. An e-mail with this information, sent to the graduate director, is sufficient.

When the Exam is Given

Beginning in the Fall 2008 term, the exam will be offered three times a year on the 10th Saturday after the first day of classes in the Fall and Spring semesters and on the 3rd Saturday after the first day of classes in Summer Session II, in order to align with the new MA Poetry Analysis Exam dates.  For Academic Year 2009-2010, those dates are:

• Saturday, October 31, 2009
• Saturday, March 20, 2010
• Saturday, July 17, 2010

**Students will have two opportunities to pass the examination. In unusual circumstances, they may petition the Graduate Studies Committee for a third chance.

How to Prepare

The exam questions will require the candidate to be conversant about texts on the list in the following ways:

• Thematic: what are the salient themes of each work, and how might these be traced for their similarities or differences of treatment in several works?
• Generic: how do one or several works operate through and on the genre they represent? What generic codes are respected, which stretched or broken and why?
• Historical: into what literary era do the works specified fall? How representative of that era (renaissance, romantic, etc.) is the work; does it define or defy the conventions understood to constitute its time period?
• Formal: how are style and structure linked to content in one or several works?
• Theoretical: what contemporary theories are particularly useful in addressing the critical questions raised by texts on the list? 

**Please visit the Exam Reading List to view all of the texts that will be covered on the exam**

Form of the Exam

The examination is in written form, and is completed in one four-hour session. It consists of four parts, each designed to take one hour.

• Part 1: The candidate will explicate one short poem, from among three chosen by the examiners.
• Part 2: The candidate will choose one of the works from the thirty-three on the list and discuss in some detail the critical questions about the work that are currently argued in the professional literature. A good answer will not just list numerous stances, but characterize and to some extent judge the importance of each.
• Parts 3 and 4: The candidate will answer two questions posed by the examiners, each of which will require discussion of three or more of the authors on the list (excluding what was chosen for Part 2).
• Among the texts chosen for Parts 2, 3, 4, at least one must have been written before 1800 and at least one must have been written after 1800.