Doctor of Philosophy
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LITERARY THEORY READING LIST
Primary exams will cover the “Classic Theory” list plus four additional lists chosen by the student. With the approval of the advisory committee, the student may add up to ten authors. Secondary exams will cover the “Classic Theory” list plus two additional lists, and the student may add up to five additional authors.
I. Classic Theory
Plato
Aristotle
Longinus
Augustine of Hippo
Christine de Pizan
Philip Sidney
John Locke or Edmund Burke
Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, or A. W. von Schlegel
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Mary Wollstonecraft
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, or Edgar Allan Poe
Friedrich Nietzsche
II. Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
Jacques Lacan
Luce Irigaray
Shoshana Felman or Gaston Bachelard
Hortense Spillers or Claudia Tate
Judith Butler
Peter Brooks
Slavoj ŽiŽek, Juliet Mitchell, or Sander Gilman
III. Formalism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism
T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, or René Wellek
Ferdinand de Saussure
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, V. Shklovsky, or V. I. Propp
Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco, or Jonathan Culler
Jacques Derrida
Jean Baudrillard or Jean François Lyotard
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Paul de Man or Barbara Johnson
IV. Aesthetics, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory
Martin Heidegger
Benedetto Croce
Roman Ingarden, Hans-Georg Gadamer, or Hans Robert Jauss
Wolfgang Iser or Paul Ricoeur
E. D. Hirsch or P. D. Juhl
Stanley Fish, David Bleich, or Louise M. Rosenblatt
Patrocinio Schweickart
Jane Tompkins
V. Cultural Studies, New Historicism, Neo-Marxism
Mikhail M. Bakhtin
Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, or Louis Althusser
Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, or Jürgen Habermas
Michel Foucault
Stephen Greenblatt or Paul Lauter
Clifford Geertz, Michel de Certeau, or Pierre Bourdieu
Fredric Jameson or Stuart Hall
Nancy Fraser or Seyla Benhabib
VI. Postcolonial, Transnational, and Global Studies
Franz Fanon
Edward Said
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Homi K. Bhabha
Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Bruce Robbins, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Paul Gilroy
Aijaz Ahmad or Mary Louise Pratt
Ranajit Guha or Dipesh Chakrabarty
VII. Critical Race Studies
Booker T. Washington
W. E. B. Du Bois
Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, or Richard Powell
Larry Neal, Trey Ellis, Stuart Hall, or Charles Johnson
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston Baker Jr., or James Snead
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Hazel Carby, or Mary Helen Washington
Robert Stepto, William Andrews, or Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cheryl Wall or Barbara Smith
Gregory Jay or George Lipsitz
VIII. Ethnicity Studies
Tzvetan Todorov
Werner Sollors
David Hollinger
Trinh T. Minh-ha or Rey Chow
Gerald Vizenor
Arnold Krupat or Simon Ortiz
Paula Gunn Allen
Gloria Anzaldúa
IX. Gender Studies
Simone de Beauvoir or Virginia Woolf
Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, or Alice Jardine
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy Armstrong, Lillian Robinson, or Annette Kolodny
Judith Butler or Michael Warner
Susan Bordo, Toril Moi, or Diana Fuss
Barbara Christian, Audre Lorde, Sara Suleri, or Chandra T. Mohanty
Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, or Drucilla Cornell
Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Elisabeth Grosz, or Bonnie Zimmerman
X. Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and New Media Studies
Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, or Hayden White
Ihab Hassan, Charles Jencks, Cornel West, or bell hooks
John Barth, Raymond Federman, Linda Hutcheon, or Brian McHale
Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, or Paul Virilio
Laura Mulvey, Tania Modleski, or Janice Radway
N. Katherine Hayles or Donna Haraway
Jim Collins, Dick Hebdige, John Fiske, Andrew Ross, or Douglas Kellner
George Landow, Silvio Gaggi or Michael Joyce
For more information, contact:
Ms. Alyson Everhart
Administrative Assistant to Graduate Studies in English
3137 MHRA
(336) 334-5311
