That's My Bix!

The semester has ended — grades are due today, but because I’m a plan ahead type, I got them in yesterday. This might be the first time ever that I’ve managed to do that before the last possible moment, so I’m chalking this up to a win, and also the fact that I only took one class this semester (which, of course, was more than I am supposed to be taking).

I kind of spaced out about the course work for that one class — my entire time in that class felt like it was just a little extra fun, so I kind of blanked that I had to do an actual term paper for it. In addition, it’s being taught by my mentor and committee advisor, so it’s poor form to totally just space out a month before you have to write an exhausting series of essays in a locked room based on the prompts that mentor will designate. So I spent my first day of finals week writing furiously for twelve hours and finished not only the term paper (a close reading of the stage directions in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” which if you have not read, I highly recommend — it might be now the third short story that I’ve designated as being perfect in every way*), a short story (about bog bodies, because I have bog bodies on the brain right now), and a craft paper about that short story and why I made the decisions I did in it.

My comp exams have been scheduled — a fact that seems like a bit of administrative work but has somehow elevated my stress about a billion percent. Before, it was just a specter looming in the distance, an abstract deadline. Now? Now I have a countdown.

The comprehensive exams are a series of essays that are written over a period of three days. The doctoral candidates are not allowed any notes or reference material and of course, there’s no access to the internet. You have a computer, a few potty breaks and four questions per day, from which you select two. Each day covers one of your three primary research areas, and a list of material that you feel represents the scope of that research area. Ideally, this means that you’ve been spending your entire graduate career developing a theoretical stance and vantage point from which to hold forth, developing the vast mental reference of all of the literature around those primary research localities, but in reality, you end up just picking stuff you have taught or read in classes so that your brain doesn’t explode.

The three research areas are “usually a genre, a significant literary period, and a speciality derived from, for instance, literary theory.” My three research areas, approved by my committee, are the novel (genre), post World War II American literature (significant literary period) and unreliable narrators (a subtopic within the literary theory of narratology**).

Since last January, I’ve been refining the source materials that these blind essay questions will be written from. Clearly, I’m allowed to go outside these lists in my responses, but the committee can only pull directly from these texts in formulating the questions. It’s been an agonizing refinement, and also, it was agreed upon by all of my committee members — which essentially meant that they also made additions to the list based on their understanding of these areas, and I had to play along. Here are my current lists (which are still getting minor tweaks). Underlined titles mean that I still need to read/study/notate them.

The Novel

• 1614: Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes
• 1688: Ooronoko; Aphra Behn         
• 1778: Evelina; Fanny Burney         
• 1811: Sense and Sensibility; Jane Austen   
• 1818: Frankenstein;   Mary Shelley 
• 1848: Jane Eyre; Charlotte Bronte 
• 1852: The Olde Curiosity Shop; Charles Dickens
• 1859: The Woman in White; Wilkie Collins
• 1925: The Great Gatsby; F. Scott Fitzgerald
• 1936: Absalom, Absalom!; William Faulkner         
• 1945: Catcher in the Rye; JD Salinger         
• 1952: The Price of Salt; Patricia Highsmith           
• 1952: Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison 
• 1955: Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov      
• 1956: Giovanni’s Room; James Baldwin     
• 1967: 100 Years of Solitude; Gabriel Garcia Marquez       
• 1969: The French Lieutenant’s Woman; John Fowles        
• 1979: Kindred; Octavia Butler         
• 1982: The Color Purple; Alice Walker         
• 1985: The Handmaid’s Tale; Margaret Atwood     
• 1987: Beloved; Toni Morrison         
• 1990: Possession; A.S. Byatt
• 1991: Generation X; Douglas Coupland     
• 2005: Never Let Me Go; Kazuo Ishiguro
• 2013: The Goldfinch; Donna Tartt  
• 2017: Little Fires Everywhere; Celeste Ng

Critical Theory

• “Toward a Feminist Poetics” Elaine Showalter
• Literary Theory: An Introduction; Terry Eagleton
• “Discourse in the Novel” Mikhail Bakhtin
• “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities” Claude Bremond and Elaine Cancalon
• “The Autobiography of my Novel” Alexander Chee
• What It Is; Lynda Barry
• On Becoming a Novelist; John Gardner

Unreliable Narrators

Primary Texts

• Don Quixote; Miguel Cervantes (1605)
• Ooronoko; Aphra Behn (1688)
• Gulliver’s Travels; Jonathan Swift (1726)
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” Edgar Allen Poe (1843)
• Wuthering Heights; Emily Brontë (1847)
• Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)
• The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn; Mark Twain (1884)
• “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
• Absalom, Absalom!; William Faulkner (1936)
• Catcher in the Rye; JD Salinger (1945)
• Lolita;  Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• The Tin Drum; Gunter Grass (1959)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Shirley Jackson (1962)
• Wide Sargasso Sea; Jean Rhys (1966)
• “The School”, “The Balloon”; Donald Barthleme (~1974)
• Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
• Beloved; Toni Morrison (1987)
• The Passion; Jeannette Winterson (1987)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany; John Irving (1988)
• The Remains of the Day; Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
• Possession; AS Byatt  (1990)
• The Virgin Suicides; Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
• Alias Grace; Margaret Atwood  (1996)
• Fight Club; Chuck Palahniuk (1996)
• House of Leaves; Mark Danielsewski (2000)
• Affinity; Sarah Waters (2000)
• Life of Pi; Yann Martell (2001)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time;  Mark Haddon            (2003)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife; Audrey Niffenegger (2009)
• Await Your Reply; Dan Chaon (2010)
• Gone Girl; Gillian Flynn (2012)
• My Favorite Thing is Monsters; Emil Ferris (2017)

Critical Theory

• The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth (1961)
• Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences. Peter Rabinowitz (1977)
• Pícaros, Madmen, Naīfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-person Narrator, William Riggan (1981)
• Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film; Seymour Chatman (1983)
• Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression and the Interuption of Narrative; James Phelan (1989)
• Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration; James Phelan (2005)
• Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative; Lisa Zunshine (2006)

American Lit Post WWII

Poetry

• “Howl”; Allen Ginsberg (1956)
• “Power”; Audre Lorde (1978)
• “Daystar” “Rosa” “Poem in Which I Refuse Contemplation” Rita Dove
• “Ash” “Thirst” “My God, It’s Full of Stars”;  Tracy K Smith
• “A Street in Bronzeville”, “The Womanhood” “We Real Cool” “The Bean Eaters” “First Fight, then Fiddle”; Gwendolyn Brooks
• “At a Bach Concert” “History”; Adrienne Rich
• “The Victims” “Sex Without Love” “I Go Back to May 1937”; Sharon Olds
• The Firebird Poems;  Gerald Locklin (1993)
• Don’t Call Us Dead; Danez Smith (2017)

Novels

• Catcher in the Rye; JD Salinger (1945)
• Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison (1952)
• Giovanni’s Room; James Baldwin (1956)
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
• Kindred; Octavia Butler; (1979)
• The Hotel New Hampshire; John Irving  (1981)
• The Color Purple; Alice Walker (1982)
• Love Medicine ; Louise Erdrich (1984)
• The Handmaid’s Tale; Margaret Atwood (1985)
• Beloved; Toni Morrison; (1987)
• Generation X; Douglas Coupland (1991)
• A Thousand Acres; Jane Smiley (1991)
• The Virgin Suicides; Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
• The Goldfinch; Donna Tartt   (2013)
• Little Fires Everywhere; Celeste Ng  (2017)

Short Stories

• “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, Flannery O’Conner
• “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Ursula K. LeGuin
• “The Shawl” Cynthia Ozick
• “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson
• “Yellow Woman” “Lullaby” Leslie Marmon Silko
• “Cathedral” Raymond Carver
• “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Joyce Carol Oates

Drama/Musicals

• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller (1949)
• The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams (1944)
• The Godfather; Francis Ford Coppola (1973)
• Buried Child, Sam Shepard (1983)
• Rent; Jonathan Larson (1996)
• Fences, August Wilson (1987)
• Hamilton; Lin-Manuel Miranda (2015)

Non-Fiction

• Notes on a Native Son; James Baldwin (1955)
• Hell’s Angels; Hunter S. Thompson  (1967)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Tom Wolfe (1968)
• On Photography; Susan Sontag (1977)
• The White Album; Joan Didion (1979)
• Zami; Audre Lorde (1982)
• Outliers; Malcolm Gladwell   (2008)
• The Argonauts; Maggie Nelson (2015)

As you might guess, a lot of theory came from my committee so I haven’t read it yet. Also, I could have added so many more texts to the Post American WWII lit section, but I was topping over 100 texts in total, so my committee begged me to condense somewhat, and also, there are so many more important non-fiction texts from this era, but since I’m a fiction person, it didn’t make sense to go over the moon in this area, so I chose some representative texts that I either love or have strong feelings about and called it a day. It also helps that there are overlaps on the lists too.

So if you need to find me, you know where I’ll be — either with my nose in a book, staring at my computer screen for e-books/pdfs, or heads down listening to Audible. Thank GOD for audio books — my eyesight is getting destroyed by doctoral studies and it’s the only thing that’s keeping me from going completely blind.

If you have comments about the texts or suggestions of what I should include instead, I’d love to hear them! Sound off in the comments!

*The other two are Robert Olen Butler’s “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” and Amanda Davis’ “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons” — oddly neither of which are on my comp list, which I just realized and am petitioning my committee to amend the list.

** I did not know “narratology” was a thing until like, seven months ago.