What am I doing this summer?
Firstly, I’m writing the first draft of a historical novel, set in 18th century Scotland.
Secondly, I’m preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams. That means reading a whole lotta books.
A PhD in Creative Writing basically has three stages: classes, comp exams, and dissertation. The first stage, which usually takes two years, is to do the coursework on literature, teaching, and fiction writing. With the spring semester finally over, that’s where I am now. Done! Done!
(It’s a great feeling to have completed all the classes I need ever take. It’s an even better feeling to think about all I’ve learned and written these last two years.)
Then, once the required number of classes are done, you put together judging committees for your three “Comprehensive” exams. You take two of those exams in the autumn semester and one in the spring. The two in the autumn come from the list of set subjects: you choose whatever two subjects you think best fit your interests and future teaching career.
In the spring, you do your third exam, the “specialised exam,” on a reading list of your own design, specifically meant to prepare you for your dissertation.
Complete that third exam successfully, and then you begin the final stage of the PhD: writing the dissertation. Because I’m focusing on fiction writing, my dissertation will be a work of fiction and an accompanying historical essay / manifesto / artist’s statement.
Knowing me, it will probably be quite long.
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So. Now it’s summer, and I need to read. Out of the possible reading lists, I’ve chosen the “novel” and the “contemporary literature,” because I figure that’s what I’ll most focus on in the future. This means reading the history of the novel and (for the contemporary exam) a host of poems, plays, and novels written after 1945, plus the great works of scholarship relating to both.
To give you a sense of what each list involves, I’m cutting and pasting most of the titles for the Novel comprehensive exam below. Which ones would you most like to read? Which ones frighten you the most? Would you have chosen a different list entirely?
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Over the summer, I’m going to write some comments on these novels as I read them (avoiding, most likely, the books on the list I already know–there won’t be time to re-read Lolita), and share some particularly fun or extravagant paragraphs from those novels. First up will be the book I’m reading right now, Thomas Pychon’s infuriating, enormous, ingenious WWII conspiracy novel, Gravity’s Rainbow.
I should have a short post on Gravity’s Rainbow ready over the next few days.
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Best wishes for your own summer reading!
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The list:
1. The Novels:
Oroonoko
Robinson Crusoe
Pamela
Tom Jones
Tristram Shandy
The Castle of Otranto
Pride and Prejudice
Waverley
Frankenstein
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Bleak House
Middlemarch
Jude the Obscure
The Pioneers
The Scarlet Letter
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Moby-Dick
Clotel
The Portrait of a Lady
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Sister Carrie
Heart of Darkness
The Good Soldier
Ulysses
A Passage to India
Mrs. Dalloway
Waterland
The Marrow of Tradition
The House of Mirth
The Great Gatsby
The Sun Also Rises
Nightwood
The Sound and the Fury
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Native Son
Invisible Man
Lolita
Gravity’s Rainbow
Ceremony
Beloved
Maus I and Maus II
Don Quixote
The Red and the Black
Père Goriot
Madame Bovary
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
Nana
The Trial
Swann’s Way
The Magic Mountain
Things Fall Apart
Jealousy
A House for Mr. Biswas
Wide Sargasso Sea
One Hundred Years of Solitude
If on a winter’s night a traveler
Midnight’s Children
2. The Scholarly Texts:
The Rise of the Novel
The Dialogic Imagination
Essentials of the Theory of Fiction
Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
(anthology)
Desire and Domestic Fiction
The Novel and the Police
The English Novel
Reading for the Plot
Story and Discourse
The Sense of an Ending
Love and Death in the American Novel
The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition
The Theory of the Novel
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
“The Literature of Exhaustion”
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative
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…I’m in a similar situation — all my coursework is done. I do get to take more classes though. Workshop rocks. 🙂 And I’ll take two other classes over the next (and last) year of my schooling. I’ll keep an eye on your reading posts — there may be some overlap with my own reading list. 🙂 I’ll be focusing on poetry and the theoretical readings but there’s still a good deal of fiction left for me to tackle. Happy reading!
p.s. — I’ve posted in-depth on Lolita here (http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/reading-lolita/) and here (http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/final-thoughts-on-lolita-nabokov/) and on The Sound and the Fury here: http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/sarsaparilla-and-jimson-weed-the-sound-and-the-fury-faulkner/. The latter I was a little intimidated by because everyone kept telling me it’s hard to read. I really, really enjoyed it though!
I also loved Wide Sargasso Sea — it’s a quick read, and so well-written. That said, Jane Eyre won’t be the same for you after you read it.
Thanks for the links! I’m reading JR now, so maybe I’ll read Sargasso Sea after it.
Also: I listened to the Sound and the Fury on audiobook. This was extremely hard going in parts: I probably missed a great deal. But on the plus side, the novel just kept going, washing over you, with no time to worry or ponder.
That’s what I did with “The Age of Innocence”… I know it would have taken me ages to read, but as an audio recording, it’s so much more enjoyable…
Wow, you have a lot going on this summer, however, they do sound fun 🙂 Good luck to you, and hope you do really well on your Ph.D exams.
Brilliant reading list! I love it. Reading through it was like a whirlwind tour of my own undergrad and graduate experience. Moby Dick, A Passage to India, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness–okay, I have way too many favorites on this list. 🙂 I’m really looking forward to hearing more about your literary journey.
Thanks!
For a lowly studio graduate, your reading list is daunting.
On average, how many hours a day do you devote to reading, and how many pages a day, + or -?
Thanks. I enjoy reading your Blog, it’s very instructive.
Hi Larry,
The reading list is daunting and I am not devoting enough time to it. I’ve been trying to read a few hours each day, but recent travel has made this harder. Fortunately, I’ve already read a lot of the novels, maybe half of the list. But I may get a lot more stressed as the summer continues…