M.A. Exam Policies

M.A. in English

Comprehensive Examination

Student Information

The M.A. in English Comprehensive Examination will be administered on the following dates:

Saturday, April 5, 2008 from 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Saturday, August 2, 2008 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 8, 2008 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Contact the English Department at (479) 968-0256 to register for the examination.

General Test Information

M.A. Examination Reading List

Sample Objective Questions and Answers

• Archived Examination

November 17, 2001

• Return to M.A. in English Home Page

M.A. In English Comprehensive Examination

Student Information

All students who are enrolled in Arkansas Tech's M.A. in English and are not completing the TESL option are required to pass the M.A. in English Comprehensive Examination. The examination is administered three times each year in November, April, and August. Specific dates, locations, and times are available from the English Department in Witherspoon Hall 141 or by phone at (479) 968-0256. Students should register for the examination in the English Department by October 15th for the November test date, by March 15th for the April test date, or by July 15th for the August date. There is no registration fee.

The Examination Committee

An examination committee, composed of three English graduate faculty members appointed by the English Department Head, will be responsible for writing, administering, and grading the examinations.

The Examination Reading List

The examination is based on the M.A. In English Examination Reading List printed below. Students are responsible for mastering the works on the List through careful selection of courses and supplementary reading. Note: a change has been made to the reading list. It will become effective starting with the November 8, 2008 administration of the examination.

The Examination

The M.A. In English Comprehensive Examination consists of three parts: a twenty-four-question objective section, an essay section focusing on the American literature on the List, and an essay section focusing on the British literature on the List.

Objective Section: Students will be given 150 minutes to identify and discuss the twenty-four quotations in this section, one from each of the twenty-four authors/works. Students must identify the author and specific work. When appropriate, students should identify the speaker or situation. The student's discussion should explain the significance of the quotation in the work. Sample objective questions and answers are printed below.

Objective questions are graded on a two-point scale. Successful and specific identification earns one point. An adequate discussion of the quotation's significance can earn a second point. A passing score for the objective section is 30 points of a possible 48.

Essay Sections: Students will be given 90 minutes to complete each essay section, selecting one of three topics in American literature and one of three topics in British literature. Each essay topic will ask the student to discuss three of the works/authors on the appropriate list. Two of the three graders will have to assign a passing grade to an essay for a student to pass that particular examination component. Students essays will be judged on effective use of concrete textual knowledge, ability to place individual writers and works in their cultural/historical contexts, and evidence of a mature critical understanding of literature.

Notification: Students will be notified of examination results within two weeks of the examination date.

Retaking Examinations: A student who fails some portion of the examination may retake the failed section(s) on the next regularly scheduled test date. A student who fails one or more parts of the examination on a second or subsequent attempt may petition the Department Head for an additional chance on the next regularly scheduled exam date. A student whose petition is denied may appeal the decision to the Dean of Graduate Studies. If an adiitional attempt is approved, the Departmtnet Head may assign the student a graduate faculty mentor to monitor the student's preparation for the retake.

Preparing for the Examination

Give Yourself Enough Time: The M.A. Examination covers a considerable body of literature, so it is important that you begin to prepare well in advance of the examination date.

Ask For Help: English faculty members are willing to help you in your preparation. For example, after reading one of the authors on the list, a brief discussion about the work with a faculty member could improve your understanding. If you do not know which faculty member might be able to help you with a particularl author, ask the Department Head for a suggestion.

M.A. In English Examination Reading List

American Literature		British Literature
Ralph Waldo Emerson	"Self-Reliance" "Nature" "The American Scholar" "The Divinity School Address"	Unknown	Beowulf
Nathaniel Hawthorne	"My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" "Young Goodman Brown" "Roger Malvin's Burial" "The Minister's Black Veil" "Rappaccini's Daughter" "Ethan Brand"	Geoffrey Chaucer	The Canterbury Tales
Herman Melville	Moby-Dick	William Shakespeare	Hamlet King Lear The Tempest Richard III
Harriet Jacobs	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	John Milton	Paradise Lost
Walt Whitman	"Song of Myself" "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" "The Wound Dresser" "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"	Henry Fielding Jonathan Swift	Tom Jones (through August 2008) Gulliver's Travels (starting November 2008)
Emily Dickinson	J67 "Success is counted sweetest" J249 "Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!" J435 "Much Madness is divinest Sense" J441 "This is my letter to the World" J465 "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died" J712 "Because I could not stop for Death" J1129 "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" J1624 "Apparently with no surprise"	Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice
Robert Frost	"Mending Wall" "The Road Not Taken" "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" "Desert Places" "Design" "After Apple Picking" "The Death of the Hired Man" "Home Burial" "Birches"	William Wordsworth	"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" "My Heart Leaps Up" "Composed upon Westminister Bridge, September 3, 1802" "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" "The World is Too Much with Us" "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads "The Ruined Cottage"
William Faulkner	Absalom, Absalom	George Eliot	Middlemarch
Thomas Stearns Eliot	"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" "The Waste Land" "the Hollow Men"	James Joyce	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	William Butler Yeats	"Easter 1916" "The Second Coming" "Sailing to Byzantium" "Leda and the Swan" "Among School Children" "The Wild Swans at Coole" "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"
Tennessee Williams	Cat on a Hot Tin Roof A Streetcar Named Desire The Glass Menagerie	Virginia Woolf	Mrs. Dalloway
Alice Walker	The Color Purple	Kazuo Ishiguro	Remains of the Day

Sample Objective Questions and Answers

The following questions and answers are designed to give students an idea of what will be expected of them on the M.A. In English Comprehensive Examination.

Sample 1

"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

This concluding line from Ellison's Invisible Man is spoken by the unnamed narrator as he "hibernates"in his underground hideout, preparing for a future reentry into aboveground society. The line invites the reader to transcend barriers of race, gender, and history to connect with the narrator's experience. It underscores Ellison's effort to make the novel an examination of human experience rather than merely of Black experience.

Sample 2

"What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--;
If design govern in a thing so small."

These lines are the concluding sestet of Frost's "Design." In this Petrarchan sonnet, Frost examines a white flower on which a white spider had captured a white moth. The title, "Design," and the poem's concluding lines ask whether the situation was brought about by design, implying the possibility of a malicious deity who has arranged such natural order only to "appall"--a word which means to shock to the point of inducing pallor. The concluding line suggests a perhaps even darker possibility--the idea that there is no order at all governing the natural world.

Sample 3

"Well, she's a blessed angel on earth, and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven."

In Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown" this "excellent resolve for the future" is spoken by Young Goodman Brown in reference to his wife Faith. Brown leaves home to undertake some dark purpose in the forest despite his young wife's request that he stay home. His comment reveals two errors in judgment on his part. First, he mistakenly assumes that his wife can determine his salvation. Second, he invests her with an impossible purity that makes it impossible for him to accept her human sinfulness and leads to eventual misanthropy.

M.A. In English Comprehensive Examination
Administered November 17, 2001

1.

"Big Daddy dotes on you, honey. And he can't stand Brother Man and Brother Man's wife, that monster of fertility, Mae. Know, how I know? By little expressions that flicker over his face when that woman is holding fo'th on one of her choice topics such as--how she refused twilight sleep!--when the twins were delivered."

2.

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--"

3.

"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

4.

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself, and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer."

5.

"Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters' race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain."

6.

"You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,"

7.

"But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn't have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery."

8.

"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

9.

"His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave clothes. Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable."

10.

"'Ah,' Mr. Compson said. 'Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?'"

11.

"'Tis better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven."

12.

"The redeemed Captive had not altogether so much of the human-angelic Species: She seemed to be, at least, of the middle Age, nor had her Face much Appearance of Beauty; but her Clothes being torn from the upper Part of her Body, her Breasts, which were well formed, and extremely white, attracted the Eyes of her Deliverer, and for a few Moments they stood silent, and gazing at each other . . ."

13.

"O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murther. . . ."

14.

"Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that whereso'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."

15.

"But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one that he approved)."

16.

"After all the evil he done I know you wonder why I don't hate him. I don't hate him for two reasons. One, he love Shug. And two, Shug use to love him. Plus, look like he trying to make something out of himself. I don't mean just that he works and he clean up after himself and he appreciate some of the things God was playful enough to make. I mean when you talk to him now he really listen."

17.

"O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware."

18.

"Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. . . however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed around, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder blades, and be content."

19.

"Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear."

20.

"There had been a time when Dr. Flint's wife came to take tea with us and when her children were also sent to have a feast of 'Aunt Marthy's' nice cooking. But after I became an object of her jealousy and spite, she was angry with grandmother for giving a shelter to me and my children. She would not even speak to her in the street. This wounded my grandmother's feelings, for she could not retain ill will against the woman whom she had nourished with her milk when a babe."

21.

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of today's newspaper."

22.

"His sin was expiated--;the curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven from the lips of Reuben Bourne."

23.

"Gat-toothed was she, smoothly for to seye.
Upon an amblere esily she sat...
And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe....
Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce
For she koude of that art the oulde daunce."

24.

"I can repeat the very words you were saying:
'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.'
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?"

American Literature Essay Questions

November 17, 2001

1.

The untamed frontier is a recurring theme in American literature. Choose three American works from the reading list and discuss how the authors or characters explore frontiers, either real or metaphorical.

2.

Examine sin and redemption in three American works from the reading list.

3.

Discuss the role of violence in three works from the American literature list.

British Literature Essay Questions

November 17, 2001

1.

Monsters come in many guises. Discuss metaphorical monsters in three of the works on the British reading list

2.

Examine the ways in which social restraints affect the characters' choices in three of the British works on the reading list.

3.

Isolation and alienation are common themes in British literature, beginning with the loneliness of the outcast and wretched Grendel in Beowulf. Trace this theme through three major works.

| M.A. In English | English Department Home Page |
updated November 26, 2007

1.	"Big Daddy dotes on you, honey. And he can't stand Brother Man and Brother Man's wife, that monster of fertility, Mae. Know, how I know? By little expressions that flicker over his face when that woman is holding fo'th on one of her choice topics such as--how she refused twilight sleep!--when the twins were delivered."
2.	"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And mourners to and fro Kept treading--treading--till it seemed That Sense was breaking through--"
3.	"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."
4.	"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself, and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer."
5.	"Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters' race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain."
6.	"You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,"
7.	"But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn't have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery."
8.	"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."
9.	"His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave clothes. Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable."
10.	"'Ah,' Mr. Compson said. 'Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?'"
11.	"'Tis better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven."
12.	"The redeemed Captive had not altogether so much of the human-angelic Species: She seemed to be, at least, of the middle Age, nor had her Face much Appearance of Beauty; but her Clothes being torn from the upper Part of her Body, her Breasts, which were well formed, and extremely white, attracted the Eyes of her Deliverer, and for a few Moments they stood silent, and gazing at each other . . ."
13.	"O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murther. . . ."
14.	"Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that whereso'er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever."
15.	"But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one that he approved)."
16.	"After all the evil he done I know you wonder why I don't hate him. I don't hate him for two reasons. One, he love Shug. And two, Shug use to love him. Plus, look like he trying to make something out of himself. I don't mean just that he works and he clean up after himself and he appreciate some of the things God was playful enough to make. I mean when you talk to him now he really listen."
17.	"O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware."
18.	"Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. . . however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed around, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder blades, and be content."
19.	"Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear."
20.	"There had been a time when Dr. Flint's wife came to take tea with us and when her children were also sent to have a feast of 'Aunt Marthy's' nice cooking. But after I became an object of her jealousy and spite, she was angry with grandmother for giving a shelter to me and my children. She would not even speak to her in the street. This wounded my grandmother's feelings, for she could not retain ill will against the woman whom she had nourished with her milk when a babe."
21.	"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of today's newspaper."
22.	"His sin was expiated--;the curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven from the lips of Reuben Bourne."
23.	"Gat-toothed was she, smoothly for to seye. Upon an amblere esily she sat... And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.... Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce For she koude of that art the oulde daunce."
24.	"I can repeat the very words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor?"

1.	The untamed frontier is a recurring theme in American literature. Choose three American works from the reading list and discuss how the authors or characters explore frontiers, either real or metaphorical.
2.	Examine sin and redemption in three American works from the reading list.
3.	Discuss the role of violence in three works from the American literature list.

1.	Monsters come in many guises. Discuss metaphorical monsters in three of the works on the British reading list
2.	Examine the ways in which social restraints affect the characters' choices in three of the British works on the reading list.
3.	Isolation and alienation are common themes in British literature, beginning with the loneliness of the outcast and wretched Grendel in Beowulf. Trace this theme through three major works.