Contemporary Literature Reading List

The following reading list represents the core reading list for the Contemporary Literature PhD exam. You will be asked to add approximately 20% more reading to this list in any or all of the genres, in consultation with your exam committee.

I. Poetry

Familiarize yourself with the major work of the following poets (see the selections in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd. ed.):

American 1.Frank O’Hara 2. Susan Howe 3.Robert Lowell 4. Yusef Komunyakaa 5. Richard Wilbur 6. Jimmy Santiago Baca 7.Charles Olson 8. Joy Harjo 9. Elizabeth Bishop 10. Cathy Song 11. Allen Ginsburg 12. Charles Bernstein 13. Sylvia Plath 14. Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka 15. Gwendolyn Brooks 16. James Merrill 17. Audre Lorde 18. John Ashbery 19. Adrienne Rich 20. Robert Creeley 21. R. Ammons 22. Rita Dove 23. Denise Levertov 24. Charles Wright 25. Michael S. Harper 26. Robert Pinsky

British and Irish 27. Philip Larkin 28. Thom Gunn 29. Ted Hughes 30. Tony Harrison 31. Seamus Heaney 32. Galway Kinnell 33. Eavan Boland 34. Paul Muldoon

International 35. Paul Celan 36. Derek Walcott 37. K. Ramanujan 38. Kamau Brathwaite 39. Christopher Okigbo 40. Les Murray 41. Judith Wright 42. Naomi Shihab Nye

II. Fiction

American 43. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) 44. Donald Barthelme Snow White 45. John Barth Lost in the Funhouse 46. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1958) or Pale Fire (1962) 47. Thomas Pynchon 1. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) 2. Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon 48. Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo (1972) 49. Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) 50. Leslie Marmon Silko Ceremony (1977) 51. Kathy Acker Great Expectations (1984) 52. William Gibson Neuromancer (1984) 53.Don Delillo White Noise (1985) 54. Philip Roth American Pastoral 55. Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985) or Suttree (1979) 56.Art Spiegelman Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale Maus II: My Father Bleeds History (1986) 57. Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) 58. Toni Morrison Beloved (1988) 59. Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried (1990?) 60. Hypertext fictions such as Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story (1993) or Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (1995)

British (mainland) 61. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954) 62. Alan Silitoe Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1958) 63. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) 64. Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) 65. Iris Murdoch The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) 66. Graham Swift Waterland (1983) 67. Jeanette Winterson Sexing the Cherry (1989) 68. Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day (1989) 69.S. Byatt Possession (1990) 70. Martin Amis Money (1984) or Time’s Arrow (1991) 71.Ian McEwan Atonement (2001)

International excluding British mainland and American 72. Naguib Mahfouz Palace Walk (1956) 73. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) 74. V. S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) 75. Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths (1962) 76. Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) 77. Kenzaburo Oe The Silent Cry (1967) 78. Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) 79. Danilo Kis A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1971) 80. Patrick White The Twyborn Affair (1979) 81. J. M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) or Disgrace (1986) 82. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) 83. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) 84. Doris Lessing The Fifth Child (1988) 85. Mariama Ba So Long a Letter (1989) 86. Jamiaca Kincaid Lucy (1990) 87. Alice Munro Open Secrets (1994) 88. Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things (1997)

III. Drama

British and Irish 89. Samuel Beckett 1. Waiting for Godot (1953) 2. Endgame (1957) or Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) 3. Not I (1972) 90. John Osborne Look Back in Anger (1956) 91. Edward Bond Saved (1965) 92. Harold Pinter The Homecoming (1965) 93. Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) or Arcadia (1994) 94. Caryl Churchill one of the following: Vinegar Tom (1976) Cloud Nine (1979) Top Girls (1982) 95. Brian Friel Translations (1980) 96. David Edgar Pentecost (1994) 97. Sarah Kane Blasted (1995) 98. Patrick Marber Closer (1997)

American 99. Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) 100. Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman (1949) or The Crucible (1953) 101. Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 102. Edward Albee The Zoo Story (1959) or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) 103. Amiri Baraka Dutchman (1964) 104. David Mamet one of the following: American Buffalo (1975) Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) Oleanna (1992) 105. Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1975) 106. Sam Shepard Buried Child (1978) or True West (1980) 107. Marsha Norman ‘night Mother (1982) 108. August Wilson Fences (1985) 109. David Henry Hwang M. Butterfly (1988) 110. Tony Kushner 1. Angels In America 2. Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991) 111. Suzan-Lori Parks The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) or The America Play (1994)

International 112. Eugene Ionesco The Bald Soprano (1950) 113. Jean Genet The Balcony (1957) 114. Derek Walcott Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1957) or Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) 115. Wole Soyinka one of the following: The Lion and the Jewel (1959) Madmen and Specialists (1970) Death and the King’s Horseman (1976) 116. Athol Fugard Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972) or “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys (1982) 117. Tomson Highway Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989)

IV. Critical Studies

Readings on Postmodernism 118. Margaret Rose The Post-modern and the Post-industrial (1991) 119. Fredric Jameson Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) 120. Thomas Docherty, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader (1993) 121. Patricia Waugh Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and Its Background, 1960-1990 (1995) 122. Stuart Sim, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (Rpt. 2002) 123. Steven Conner The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (2004) 124. Matei Calinescu Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987)