I am attempting to figure out how to best catalog my reading life. I am not sure how to do that. So, I am starting with what I have to catalog: my reading lists for my comprehensive exams scheduled for Fall 2027.
Currently, the University of Tennessee English PhD student must successfully complete two comprehensive exams. These exams are scheduled after the completion of their course work (typically end of year 2) and before the defense of the prospectus (mid year 3). I have opted to take two American Literature exams:
- American Literature 1830-1914 (three questions)
- 1830-1865
- 1865-1914
- specialized theme
- Twentieth-century American Literature (four questions)
- prose
- poetry
- drama
- specialized theme
Each exam has a specified reading list. Additionally, the student (me) is required to add an additionally 20% of specialized material to the list with rationale. I haven’t even started to think about that yet.
The lists are extensive. I have decided to use this platform to track the notes and the reading. This works for a number of reasons:
- It is flexible. The add page/post, hyperlink, search function available here is fairly GOAT as far as I can imagine from an organizational point to view. I started with an excel sheet and a word document. I quickly decided that was not going to work for this scope.
- It is scalable. My other reading projects can also find space here for all the reasons mentioned in my previous point.
- It is archivable. As long as this platform survives, so does my information. If this platform fails, I thinkI have more immediate concerns.
- It is interactive. I am blessed with folks who are interested in this journey and who have offered to assist in talking with me and exchanging ideas This makes that much easier.
- It is comfortable. I have worked with the blog platform for a long time. I am a big fan of no learning curve.
American Literature 1830 to 1912
Primary Works
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (selections)
William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” and “The Painted Cup”
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”
“The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle”
“The Raven,” “To Helen,” “Ulalume,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline OR selected shorter poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The Slave’s Dream,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “Nature,” “The Fire of Driftwood,” “The Slave Singing at Midnight,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “Mezzo Cammin,” “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” and “The Cross of Snow”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “Massachusetts to Virginia,” “Ichabod!,” and “Snow-Bound”
James Russell Lowell
Selected stanzas from A Fable for Critics
The Harvard Commemoration Ode
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” and “The Chambered Nautilus”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
“The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Transcendentalist,” “The Poet,” “Experience,” “Fate,” and any two essays from Representative Men
“Thoreau”
“Each and All,” “Concord Hymn,” “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” “Uriel,” “Threnody,” “Hamatreya,” and “Days”
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass OR My Bondage and My Freedom
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Southwestern Humor
George Washington Harris, any two Sut Lovingood stories
Augustus B. Longstreet, “The Fight” and “The Horse Swap”
Thomas B. Thorpe, “The Big Bear of Arkansas”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
The Blithedale Romance OR The House of the Seven Gables
“The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
Typee OR The Confidence-Man
“Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”
“Hawthorne and His Mosses”
“The Portent,” “Shiloh,” “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight,” “The Maldive Shark,” and “After the Pleasure Party”
Billy Budd
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft
George Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Sarah Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Ruth Hall
William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter
Henry David Thoreau
“Resistance to Civil Government”
Walden
“Walking” OR “Slavery in Massachusetts”
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (1855)
Selections from Drum-Taps
“By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Democratic Vistas
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Martin Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America
Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
Abraham Lincoln, First and Second Inaugural Addresses and Gettysburg Address
Joel Chandler Harris, “Free Joe and the Rest of the World” and “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story”
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Augustin Daly, Under the Gaslight
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women OR Work
George Washington Cable, “‘Tite Poulette” and “Belles Demoiselles Plantation”
Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan” and “Meh Lady: A Story of the War”
Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Innocents Abroad OR A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court OR Pudd’nhead Wilson
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It”
Emily Dickinson, selected poetry
Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy
Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga” (a brief perusal of The Devil’s Dictionaryis also recommended)
Charles W. Chesnutt
The House Behind the Cedars OR The Marrow of Tradition
“The Goophered Grapevine,” “Dave’s Neckliss” (from The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales), “The Wife of His Youth,” and “The Sheriff’s Children” (from The Wife of His Youth)
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
“Désirée’s Baby,” “At the ’Cadian Ball,” and “The Storm”
Mary Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham OR A Hazard of New Fortunes
Henry James
Daisy Miller: A Study
The Portrait of a Lady
The American OR The Bostonians OR The Ambassadors
“The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Real Thing,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Jolly Corner,” and “The Author of Beltraffio”
“The Art of Fiction”
Stephen Crane
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets OR The Red Badge of Courage
“The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Monster”
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs OR A Country Doctor
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Sport of the Gods
“Accountability,” “We Wear the Mask,” “Philosophy,” “When Malindy Sings,” “Robert Gould Shaw,” and “Song of Summer”
Abraham Cahan, “Yekl”
Frank Norris, McTeague OR The Octopus
Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (selections)
Jack London, The Call of the Wild OR White Fang
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Ethan Frome OR Summer
Criticism
Note: Pick twenty works from the following list, in conjunction with your advisor, that reflect the breadth of American literary studies on the period from 1830 to 1914. To individualize your selection, you may modify up to 20%, approximately four or five works. The department strongly recommends that your reading of both primary and critical works be accompanied by concurrent reading of the appropriate sections of either the Cambridge History of American Literature or the Columbia Literary History of the United States.
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865
Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America
Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism
David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance
Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century
Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867
Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists
Donald Pizer, Documents of American Realism and Naturalism
David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville
John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860
Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism
Robert P. Lamb and G. R. Thompson, eds., A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914
Twentieth-century American Literature
Prose
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Henry James, The Ambassadors
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and four short stories
Jean Toomer, Cane
William Faulkner, two of the following: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing
George Schuyler, Black No More
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Richard Wright, Native Son and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and three other short stories
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man and “The World and the Jug”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Ann Petry, The Street
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 OR Gravity’s Rainbow
Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From
Toni Morrison, two of the following: Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Trey Ellis, Platitudes
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Art Spiegelman, Maus I and Maus II
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Poetry
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” “A Pact,” “The Garden,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and selections from The Cantos
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” and Four Quartets
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Robert Frost, “The Pasture,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Out, Out—,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Wood-Pile,” “Desert Places,” “Once by the Pacific,” and “Design”
Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” and “Heritage”
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Drum,” “The Same,” “The English,” “Johannesburg Mines,” “I, Too,” “Dream Variations,” “Harlem,” and “Theme for English B”
Hart Crane, The Bridge
E. E. Cummings, “O sweet spontaneous,” “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” and “next to of course god America i”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” “To the One of Fictive Music,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West”
William Carlos Williams, excerpts from Paterson
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” selections from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, The Will to Change, and “When We Dead Awaken” (essays)
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish,” “One Art,” “In the Waiting Room,” “Sestina,” “Questions of Travel,” and “The Armadillo”
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” “A Supermarket in California,” and “America”
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “For the Union Dead,” and “Skunk Hour”
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville and selected poems
Maya Angelou, selected poem
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz,” “I Knew a Woman,” and “The Far Field”
Denise Levertov, “Illustrious Ancestors,” “Making Peace,” and “A Woman Alone”
Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (drama)
A. R. Ammons, “Corsons Inlet” and Garbage (1993)
Audre Lorde, “Power,” “Walking Our Boundaries,” “Never Take Fire from a Woman,” and “Stations”
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
Yusef Komunyakaa, selected poems
Joy Harjo, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” “New Orleans,” “Remember,” “Vision,” and “We Must Call a Meeting”
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli (1993)
Charles Bukowski, selected poems
James Merrill, selected poems
John Ashbery, selected poems
- “Some Trees”
- “The Boy”
Simon Ortiz, selected poems
Cathy Song, selected poems
Drama
Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and Long Day’s Journey into Night
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel
Paul Green, In Abraham’s Bosom
Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Sophie Treadwell, Machinal
Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine
Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty
Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes
Langston Hughes, Mulatto
Georgia Douglas Johnson, Blue Blood
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie
Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Sam Shepard, Buried Child
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Zoo Story
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
August Wilson, Fences and The Piano Lesson
Amiri Baraka, Dutchman
George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (1995)
Theory and Criticism
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism
Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds
Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of Afro-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age
Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction
General Studies and Introductions
Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition
Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature
C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Vols. 1, 2, and 3
Alfredo Jiménez, ed., Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art
Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context
David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After
Joy Porter and Kenneth Roemer, The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature