Every English major will take an examination based, in 2020, on the following reading list:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Frances Burney, Evelina
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Nella Larsen, Passing
James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie
Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus
John Donne, "The Good Morrow," "Song-'Go and catch a falling star,'" "The Sun Rising," "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," "The Relic," Holy Sonnet 7 - "At the Round earth's imagined corners," Holy Sonnet 10 - "Death be not proud," Holy Sonnet 14 - "Batter my heart," "A valediction: Forbidding Mourning," Elegy XIX - "To His Mistress Going to Bed."
William Blake, "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence, "Introduction" to Songs of Experience, "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "The Divine Image," "The Sick Rose," "The Clod and the Pebble," "The Human Abstract," "London," "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Earth's Answer," "And Did Those Feet," and "Night."
Rita Dove, "A Suite for Augustus," "Kentucky 1833," "Banneker," "Parsley," "Shakespeare Say," "The Slave's Critique of Practical Reason," "The Stroke," "Thomas at the Wheel," "Weathering Out," "Daystar," "The Great Palaces of Versailles," "Oriental Ballerina."