Senior Reading List 2015

Every English major will take an examination, based in 2015 on the following reading list:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Wanderer and The Seafarer

Aphra Behn, Oronooko

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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"

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Danse Africaine," "The Weary Blues," "Cross," "I, Too," "Homesick Blues," "Po' Boy Blues," "Song for a Dark Girl," Montage of a Dream Deferred (all poems in the Sequence)

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, "Resolution and Independence," "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802," "Nuns Fret Not," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "The World is Too much with Us," "Surprised by Joy," "Mutability"

Since this reading list is short, students can expect that the examination will test their knowledge of each and every work.