Every English major will take an examination, based in 2019 on the following reading list:
—. Everyman.
Shakespeare, William. Winter’s Tale.
Jonson, Ben. Volpone.
More, Thomas. Utopia.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.
Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine.
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth.
Milton, John. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” “How Soon Hath Time,” “On The New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament,” “To The Lord General Cromwell, May 1652,” “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” and “Methought I Saw My Late Espouséd Saint.”
Wordsworth, William. “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Nuns Fret Not,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Resolution and Independence,” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, “Solitary Reaper.” “The Tables Turned,” and “The World is Too much with Us.”
Rich, Adrienne. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “Orion,” “Planetarium,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Diving into the Wreck,” “Grandmothers,” “Yom Kippur 1984,” “Twenty-One Love Poems,” and “XIII (Dedications)” (from the longer poem “An Atlas”).