MA Exam

In order to graduate with a Masters degree in English, graduate students must complete a comprehensive exam over a group of creative and theoretical texts that span a range of British and American literary periods.  Reading lists for the exam are crafted around major literary themes, and they include examples of all the major genres.  Specific reading lists change every two academic years.

The three-hour written exam is broken into two parts: a short essay section and a long response section.  Students are required to select and answer 4 prompts from the first section (short answer) and two prompts from the last (long answer) during the three hour time frame.  Specific questions will be tailored to suit the length of the specified response, and all queries will require close readings of individual works as well as articulations of those texts’ major historical, generic, and theoretical contexts. 

Exams are scheduled for the third Saturday of April and the third Saturday of July of every academic year.  Students interested in taking the M.A. exam should contact the graduate coordinator 4 weeks prior to the test date to determine test times, availability, and testing location.  

 

Permanent M.A. in English
Reading List
Morehead State University

 15 titles

   

Chaucer, Geoffrey   Selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)

            The Knight’s Tale

            The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale

            The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

            The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale

            The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

            The General Prologue

            The Merchant’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

            The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas

            The Canon’s Yoeman’s Prologue and Tale    

               

Shakespeare, William Hamlet  (1601)

 

 

Donne, John  Songs and Sonnets  (1633; 1635)

           

Milton, John  Paradise Lost  (1667; 1674)

 

Wordsworth, William  and  Samuel T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edition (1802)

 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel   Scarlet Letter   (1850 )

 

 

Eliot, George  Middlemarch  (1871-72)

 

Herman, Herman   Moby Dick   (1851)

                

Eliot, T.S.  The Wasteland  (1922)

 

Dickinson, Emily  Selected Poems   (1924)

            “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”

            “Success is counted sweetest”

            “I heard a fly buzz when I died—“

            “Because I could not stop for Death”

            “Wild Night!  Wild Nights!

             “I taste a liquor never brewed”

             “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain”

             “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun”

             “I dwell in Possibility”

              “The Soul selects her own Society—“

 

Beckett, Samuel  Waiting for Godot  (l948)

 

Morrison, Toni  Beloved  (1987)

 

 

Three titles for  Fall 2009- Summer 2011 rotation

  

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century)

 

         English translation l975 by J.R.R. Tolkien  or

         English  translation 2007 by Simon Armitage

 

Tennyson, Alfred Lloyd  In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

 

Williams, Tennessee A Streetcar Named Desire  (l947)