Reading List This reading list serves two functions: by grouping English literature into periods and genres and requiring you to present specific groups at your exams, it ensures that by the time you complete your studies you will have encountered a wide range of texts. The works on which you are examined are those analysed in courses and seminars; to extend your experience beyond these texts and give you a better idea of the context in which they were written and received, we require you to read other works for yourself and be prepared to discuss them. This list offers examples of texts that you might include in your programme. Your own reading list will comprise works of your own choice, which your teachers will help you to make. BA students (who started their studies in 2004 or 2005) will have to wait a few days for their specific instructions, which will be printed here. The following lines are for students doing the old licence. At the level of the 1ST CERTIFICATE you must present three groups centred on works you have studied in seminars and courses: one group from the medieval period (groups 1 6) which is prepared in the IMLL seminar in your second year, and two of groups 7 to 25, prepared in the explication de texte seminars from your second semester onwards. Your modern texts should include two different genres and two different centuries. (An essay can compensate for lack of balance in this respect.) NB For the poetry and short story groups (9, 15, 17, 18, 21 and 24), you will be examined on your seminar programme plus other authors of your choice to a total of three. The heading of each of the twenty-five groups specifies the number of entries you have to take. (In most groups an entry corresponds to an author, with one or more works to read.) If you present group 22, for instance, having studied D. H. Lawrence s Sons and Lovers in a seminar, you must choose two more entries, making a total of three. You might take Joseph Conrad s Secret Agent as your second entry (or another novel by Conrad), and A. S. Byatt s prize-winning novel, Possession, as your third entry or any other selection of authors and titles to a total of three. The modern literature exam consists of analysis of a passage taken from works or authors studied in the seminar you attended, and a general question or questions relating the works on your reading list to your seminar text(s).* * When signing on for the oral exams, indicate seminar texts with an asterisk.
The literature programme at the SECOND CERTIFICATE level is based on a reading list that each student draws up individually. The following titles are offered as examples of texts that could be included. Your own reading list will be made up of works of your own choice. The reading list requirements for the OLD LICENCE are as follows: Branche principale 1) Branche principale students presenting all three domaines of literature medieval, English and American take twelve groups. 2) Branche principale students presenting linguistics as a domaine and only two domaines of literature take nine groups. Branche secondaire (and branche de soutien) 1) Students presenting two or three domaines of literature medieval, English and American take nine groups. 2) Students presenting linguistics and at least one domaine of modern literature take seven groups. 3) Students who present only linguistics and medieval literature and have no modern literature in their programme have a separate reading list defined by agreement with their teachers. 2 The reading list is divided into four main periods: medieval; Elizabethan and 17th century; Restoration and 18th century; 19th and 20th centuries. Within each period, the following minimum requirements apply: medieval: Elizabethan & C17th: Restoration & C18th: C19th & C20th: two groups (three if English is your branche principale) provided that medieval is one of your chosen domaines group 7 (Shakespeare) is required + one additional group one group group 15 (Romantic Poetry) is required + one additional group. The choice of any remaining groups is free. In the three modern periods (Elizabethan to C19th & C20th), your reading list may include anglophone writers of any nationality (English, Irish, South African, Caribbean, American, Australian, etc.) regardless of the domaine(s) you choose for your exam subjects.
The heading of each of the twenty-five groups specifies the number of entries you have to take. (In most groups an entry corresponds to an author, with one or more works to read.) In group 2, for example, you must choose three entries; you might take The Battle of Maldon as your first entry, The Wanderer and The Seafarer as your second entry, and Genesis B as your third entry. Medieval 1. Old English Epic: Beowulf 2. Old English Poetry (3 entries) The Battle of Maldon The Wanderer, The Seafarer Caedmon s Hymn, The Dream of the Rood Genesis B 3. Chaucer (1 entry) Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, the Physician s and Pardoner s Tales Canterbury Tales: The Miller s, Reeve s, Merchant s and Shipman s Tales Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath s Prologue and Tale, the Clerk s and Franklin s Tales The Parlement of Foules, the Nun s Priest s Tale from the Canterbury Tales 4. Medieval Romance (1 entry) The Owl and the Nightingale Havelok, Amys and Amylion Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight Sir Orfeo; Malory s Morte D Arthur, Books 1, 20 and 21 5. Religious and Polemic Literature (1 entry) Piers Plowman, Prologue and Passus 1 7 Pearl Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love The Book of Margery Kempe 6. Medieval Drama (2 entries) The Chester play of Noah, the Brome play of Abraham The Wakefield Second Shepherds Play Everyman 3
Elizabethan and 17th century 7. Shakespeare (at the BA level: 2 plays plus Sonnet list) MA: 3 plays, plus Sonnets 15, 18, 29, 30, 55, 73, 116, 129, 138, 146 8. Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2 entries) Marlowe, Dr. Faustus Jonson, The Alchemist Webster, The Duchess of Malfi 9. Renaissance Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA all) Wyatt, Madam, Withouten Many Words, Whoso List to Hunt, My Lute, Awake, They Flee from Me Donne, Go and Catch a Falling Star, The Canonization, Valediction Forbidding Mourning, The Sun Rising Jonson, To Penshurst, To the Memory of... Wm. Shakespeare, On My First Son Herbert, The Collar, Love (3), The Flower, Death 10. Milton (1 entry) Comus, Lycidas, How Soon Hath Time, When I Consider, Samson Agonistes Paradise Lost Restoration and the 18th century 11. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy (3 entries) Wycherley, The Country Wife Congreve, The Way of the World Gay, The Beggar s Opera Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer Sheridan, School for Scandal 12. Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1 entry) Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (I), MacFlecknoe Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock Pope, The Dunciad Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, London 13. Eighteenth-Century Prose (1 entry) Swift, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books Swift, A Modest Proposal, Gulliver s Travels Addison and Steele, selected Tatler and Spectator essays Johnson, Preface to Dictionary, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the Poets (Cowley, Milton) Boswell, The Life of Johnson Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women 4
14. Eighteenth-Century Novel (1 entry) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders Richardson, Clarissa Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones Sterne, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey Burney, Evelina, Cecilia Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho 19th and 20th centuries 15. Romantic Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 5 entries) Blake, London, The Tyger, The Clod & the Pebble, Holy Thursday Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 1799 Prelude Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: an ode Byron, Prisoner of Chillon, Stanzas to the Po, Don Juan Canto 1 Keats, On First Looking into Chapman s Homer, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn Shelley, The Triumph of Life, Adonais, Ode to the West Wind, The World s Great Age Begins Anew (Chorus from Hellas ) 16. Nineteenth-Century Prose (1 entry) Hazlitt, De Quincey and Lamb (selections) Arnold, Wordsworth, The Study of Poetry, Literature and Science Mill, What is Poetry? On Liberty, Autobiography Carlyle, The French Revolution (selections) Ruskin, Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice (selections) Emerson, Nature, Self-Reliance, The Oversoul, Experience Thoreau, Walden 17. Victorian Poetry (all; at the BA level: 3 entries5 entries) Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses, Morte d Arthur, Maud Browning, My Last Duchess, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Love Among the Ruins Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Mother and Poet, A Year s Spinning Arnold, Dover Beach, The Buried Life Hopkins, God s Grandeur, The Windhover, Spring and Fall, Terrible Sonnets 18. Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA all) Poe, The Raven, To Helen, The City in the Sea, Annabel Lee Emily Dickinson, There s a certain Slant of light, After great pain, I started early, Because I could not stop for Death, As imperceptibly as Grief 5
6 Whitman, Song of Myself (selections, for instance 1 5 & 52), When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 19. Nineteenth-Century Novel (2 entries) Scott, Waverley Austen, Pride and Prejudice Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Melville, Moby Dick Thackeray, Vanity Fair Dickens, Great Expectations George Eliot, Middlemarch Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn Henry James, Portrait of a Lady Hardy, Tess of the D Urbervilles 20. The Short Story (3 entries) Poe, Ligeia, The Purloined Letter The Fall of the House of Usher Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini s Daughter, The Minister s Black Veil James, The Figure in the Carpet, The Real Thing, The Beast in the Jungle Joyce, The Sisters, Araby, The Dead Mansfield, Daughters of the Late Colonel, Bliss, Je ne Parle pas Français Lawrence, Odour of Chrysanthemums, The Horse-Dealer s Daughter, The Prussian Officer Faulkner, The Bear, Barn Burning, A Rose for Emily Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Big Two-Hearted River, Cat in the Rain 21. Modern Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 4 entries) Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men Pound, I Make a Pact With You, Walt Whitman, In a Station of the Metro, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Yeats, Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop, Leda and the Swan, Sailing to Byzantium Frost, Stopping By Woods, Once by the Pacific, Design Stevens, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The Idea of Order at Key West Williams, Spring and All, Burning the Christmas Greens, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, Musée des Beaux Arts, The Shield of Achilles
22. Twentieth-Century Novel (3 entries) Conrad, Heart of Darkness Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Lawrence, Sons and Lovers Woolf, To the Lighthouse Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Beckett, Malone Dies Morrison, Song of Solomon Rushdie, Midnight s Children Carter, Wise Children Byatt, Possession 23. Modern Drama (3 entries) Miller, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible Albee, Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Zoo Story Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere s Fan Beckett, Waiting For Godot, Endgame Pinter, The Caretaker, The Homecoming Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties 24. Post-war Poetry (at the BA level: 3 entries; MA: 4 entries) Plath, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Edge Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Dream Songs 1, 14 Lowell, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, For the Union Dead, Night Sweat Merrill, Lost in Translation, An Urban Convalescence, Mirabell s Books of Number (selection) Larkin, Church Going, MCMXIV, High Windows Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa, The Glory Trumpeter, Omeros (selection) Hill, September Song, Mercian Hymns 6 & 7 Heaney, Station Island, Digging, Punishment, Exile Runes 25. Open Category (3 entries) Works not classifiable under the above headings, such as science or detective fiction, autobiographies, literary theory, screenplays, etc. (List last revised September 2003) 7