TO:             Graduate Students Considering Taking a Comprehensive Exam on 20^th Century American Literature

From:  Robert Donahoo

            To help students prepare for taking a comprehensive exam in 20^th Century American Literature from me, I offer the following suggestions:

1.      Students should be prepared by having a general knowledge of the two major historical/stylistic categories that are generally used to describe 20^th Century American literature:  modernism and postmodernism.  While I do not require students to accept or promote any one definition of either term, they should:

·         Have in mind a set of specific literary qualities they see as defining each term.

·         Have a defensible set of historical boundaries for each category.

·         Have an awareness of the “problems” presented by the use of each term.

Students should consult at least some critical studies for help with these items.  A few I can recommend are:

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker

A Poetics of Postmodernism by Linda Hutcheon

Modernism Quartet, by Frank Lentricchia

Critical Essays on American Modernism, ed. Michael Hoffman & Patrick Murphy

Our America, by Walter Benn Michaels

Postmodernism and Its Critics by John McGowan

Postmodernist Fictions by Brian McHale

Students should come to the exam prepared to discuss literary works that fall within the following boundaries:

·         At least three modernist novels by three different authors (example:  Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God)

·         At least three postmodernist novels by three different authors (example:  Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Morrison’s Beloved)

·         At least two prose texts by authors difficult to fit in either category (example:   Bellow’s Seize the Day, O’Connor’s Wise Blood, or Ellison's Invisible Man)

·         At least three short stories or short story collections by modernist authors (Example:   Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”)

·         At least three short stories or short story collections by postmodernist authors (Example:   Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Mason’s “Shiloh,” and O'Brien's "The Things They Carried”)

·         At least three poems each by three different modernist poets (example:  Eliot’s “Gerontion,” “Journey of the Magi,” and “The Waste Land”; Frost’s “The Oven-Bird,” “Mending Wall,” and “Birches”; Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar”)

·         At least three poems each by three different postmodernist poets (example:  Bishop’s “The Moose,” “The Monument,” and “The Fish”; Lowell’s “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “Skunk Hour,” and “For the Union Dead”; Merwin’s “The Wilderness,” “Grandmother Dying,” and “St. Vincent’s”)

·         At least three works by ethnic writers (Example:  Morrison’s Sula, Wright’s Native Son, and Dove’s Thomas and Beulah) and an awareness of the place of ethnic writing in the 20^th century, especially its connections to or disconnections from modernism and postmodernism.

2.      For each literary author a student hopes or plans to discuss, he/she should be able to  show knowledge of at least some of the critical opinion that surrounds the author.  It will be especially useful if the student can connect specific critics with particular views or interpretations.

These suggestions may sound daunting, but they are tempered by the format by exam will take.  That format consists of the following:

·         As with all four of a student’s exams, I will expect a student to spend no more than one hour on my exam.

·         I will ask students to answer only one question during the hour.

·         I will give students a choice of from three (the minimum) to six questions.  This enables students to draw on their strengths rather than allowing me to pick on their weaknesses.

In other words, no student will write an essay touching on all the material listed above.  However, the closer a student comes to having fulfilling my list of objectives, the more he/she can be sure that no question I ask will be difficult to answer. 

      Finally, I simply encourage students to enjoy their time preparing for the exam:  be amazed by how much you know and how much there is to know.  Then come to the exam relaxed and ready to write a coherent, intelligent essay.  You should do well.

      Good luck!