The PhD Oral Examination in Novel
(Revised January 2008)
Guidelines
The focus of the examination is on the characteristics that help place individual works within the history of the novel as a genre. The contribution that a novel makes in its management of such formal components as time, voice, and character is no less important than thematic issues. Candidates should be conversant with: the formal elements that enter into the construction of novels; social and historical background; periodization and the definition of major movements; recent developments in the theory of narrative. Although discussion will be wide-ranging, both in terms of literary history and in terms of the varying modes of the novel, candidates may wish to select a larger topic, focus, or concern that can provide an organizing framework for the novel list: e.g., irony, realism, omniscience, the role of politics and empire or the coding of sexuality and gender.
Lists should include forty novels. Two short novels count as one full-length work. Novel and period lists may overlap, but no more than ten works may appear on both lists. Lists must include the following core of novelists in addition to a selection of at least five works outside the Anglo-American tradition:
* Eighteenth Century: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, two others
* Gothic: One work
* Nineteenth Century: Scott, Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, George Eliot, three others
* Turn of the Century: Hardy, James, Conrad
* Modern: Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, two others
* Recent: Five novelists after 1940
Lists must also include at least six critical works, two from each section (you may propose alternative texts in any category).
Section A: Foundational texts
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”; S/Z
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction; A Rhetoric of Irony
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Ortega y Gasset, "A Short Treatise on the Novel" in Meditations On Quixote
Henry James, The Art of the Novel
F. R. Leavis: The Great Tradition
Percy Lubbock: The Craft of Fiction
Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel; Studies in European Realism; The Theory of the Novel
Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg: The Nature of Narrative
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society
Section B: Narrative Theory, Genre Studies
H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think
Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences
R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse
Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds; The Distinction of Fiction
Margaret Doody, The True Story of the Novel
Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction
William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life
Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse
Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
Kaete Hamburger, The Logic of Literature
David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel; Narrative Form
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; The Art of Telling
S-Y Kuroda, “Reflections on the Foundations of Narrative Theory”
Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice
A. A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel
D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders; Graphs, Maps, Trees
Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics
James Phelan, Living to Tell About It
James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, eds., Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory
Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology
Peter Rabinowitz, Before Reading
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method;
F. K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Novels
Alex Wolloch, The One and the Many
Section C: Cultural and Literary History
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness
R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition
Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature
Johnathan Freedman, Professions of Taste
Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic
Linda Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial
J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism
Laurie Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life
Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination
Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets
D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition; The Forms of Victorian Fiction
Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World System From Goethe To Garcia Marquez;
Moretti also edits a 2 volume collection on The Novel (Vol.I: History, Geography and Culture Vol.II: Forms and Theme)
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men; Epistemology of the Closet
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings; Desire and Truth
Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil
Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel