Reading Lists, Portfolios, and Prospectuses
English Ph.D. Written-Exam Reading Lists
Coverage. As you start compiling your reading list for the Ph.D. written exam (the first of
two doctoral candidacy exams), keep in mind that the area covered by the written exam
should be noticeably broader than the area covered by your dissertation. The broad
area of specialization covered by the exam—and represented by the works you select
for your reading list—should include the more specific research area you intend to
inhabit while writing your dissertation but should usually not be limited to that
focus. You can think of your reading list for the exam as representing multiple research
areas, and multiple teaching areas, and you can plan on marketing your research interests
and teaching expertise to search committees in terms of these areas if you ultimately
decide to go on the academic job market. Because the broad area of specialization
covered by the Ph.D. written exam usually includes multiple research and teaching
areas, students often divide their reading lists for the exam into sections and use
subheadings to organize their bibliographical entries.
Number and Types of Works Included. Because students’ reading lists for the Ph.D. written exam reflect differing research
interests and areas of expertise, reading lists naturally vary in terms of the number
and types of works included. As you define your broad area of specialization, and
begin to compile your reading list, you might initially think of including 75 to 100
entries, with perhaps half of them being books and half being articles, although the
number and types of works included will change, of course, as you receive feedback
from your Advisory Committee and your reading list evolves.
Your reading list may include works you know well, works you need to reread, and works
you’ve never read. For secondary sources, you may have reason to include older material
but should typically concentrate on publications from the past twenty years or so:
in addition to helping you develop a broad area of specialization, the process of
reading for the Ph.D. written exam should help you position your dissertation research
within a current scholarly conversation, once you start writing your dissertation.
Depending on how you and the chair of your Advisory Committee decide to define your
broad area of specialization, you may not need to include a large number of purely
theoretical texts on your reading list. The members of your committee will, however,
expect your reading list to demonstrate that you are making informed methodological
choices; therefore, your committee members will expect to see a respectable amount
of theory, or theoretically rich analyses, on the list. Even in the earliest versions
of your reading list, you should include your selections as full bibliographical entries
in the correct (usually MLA or APA style) form so that you and the members of your
Advisory Committee can more easily consider publication dates and any particular editions
you may be using.
Interaction with Your Advisory Committee. It is critical that you have regular interaction with your Advisory Committee while
compiling your reading list for the Ph.D. written exam. Be sure to communicate regularly
with the chair of your committee, in particular, consulting with him or her about
the coverage of your reading list and about the number and types of sources you are
including. Whenever you are in doubt about how to proceed with your reading list,
meet with, and talk directly to, the chair of your committee. When your chair says
you are ready to do so, share your list with the other two members of your Advisory
Committee and ask them to respond to it. You should give your reading list to your
chair, and then to the rest of your committee, as early as possible, because the committee
members may well want you to make major changes to the list (for example, to add more
theory or to replace older secondary sources with more recently published material)
before they feel you are ready to schedule the Ph.D. written exam.
Exam Preparation. Once your entire Advisory Committee has approved your reading list for the Ph.D.
written exam, you will likely need to spend the next several months preparing for
the exam by reading your way through all the works on the list and carefully taking
notes on them. As you prepare, keep in mind that the exam is open note and open book:
you won’t need to worry about memorizing information, but you probably will want to
take thoughtful and well-organized notes, in anticipation of using your notes during
the exam. While reading through your list, you will almost certainly want to write
summaries of some of the works and perhaps want to write detailed responses to some.
Be sure, however, also to take notes that will enable you to synthesize the works—that
is, to make meaningful connections among them. In a few cases, you may realize while
reading something that it isn’t especially useful for your purposes; in such cases,
you may ask your committee members whether you can remove it from your reading list.
Format and Expectations. The format of the Ph.D. written exam provides each student with 72 hours (three consecutive days) at home to compose essays in response to the questions on the exam. Most Advisory Committees include three questions on the written exam, and the format for your particular exam may or may not provide a choice in answering the questions. Your exam could require you to write on three out of three questions, to write on two out of three questions, or to answer one question and then choose between two others. Each student is expected to write approximately 30 double-spaced pages in response to the exam questions—about 15 pages on each of two questions, or about 10 pages on each of three questions. Because the written exam is open book (as well as open note), students are expected to provide full documentation, including parenthetical citations and a “Works Cited” or “References” page, with each essay submitted.
When your Advisory Committee assesses your responses to the exam questions, the committee will not expect you to have generated publishable ideas and prose. In assessing your exam responses, the committee will, however, consider the following: 1) your knowledge of your broad area of specialization; 2) your understanding of the current scholarly conversation(s) to which your dissertation will contribute; 3) your ability to analyze intelligently, and to synthesize with purpose, the works on your reading list; and 4) your ability to write coherent, detailed, and persuasive essays under pressure.
English M.A. Portfolios
When you are nearing the end of your first semester of the M.A. program, you should
decide whether you want to complete a portfolio for the final project of your degree
program or whether you want to complete a thesis. Students choosing to complete a
portfolio are advised to stay committed to that option once they decide upon it as
switching to the thesis option later may result in their not having enough time to
finish the thesis project by the end of their second year in the program.
Students choosing the portfolio option must take ENGL 52103/Portfolio Workshop the spring semester of their second year in the program—that is, the semester they plan to graduate. Students prepare and submit portfolios by the end of the course, and the portfolios are evaluated by a committee of three faculty members: the professor of ENGL 52103 (who serves as chair of the committee), the Director of Graduate Studies, and another committee member selected by the professor of the course. Portfolios are given a score of Pass or Fail, and a student must receive a passing score in order to complete the M.A. program. If a student receives a failing score, he or she is allowed to rework the portfolio and to submit it a second time, but this second attempt at receiving a passing score is the final one granted.
The writing selected for a student’s portfolio should include five to ten main documents totaling 50-75 pages and an introductory essay of 5-10 pages.
The introductory essay should provide an overview of the main documents selected for the portfolio and contextualize each of them. The introductory essay should also offer a self-reflective account of the student’s trajectory in the program, considering the student’s goals and objectives in undertaking the program, the development and growth experienced as a result of work in the program, and an indication of how this work could be applied to future career development.
The five to ten main documents for the portfolio should represent a student’s best work in the program, so at least one of the main documents should normally be a researched critical essay written for a course and revised for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Other types of documents that could be suitable for the portfolio include shorter critical essays, pedagogical pieces, websites and multi-media projects, and job application materials.
English M.A. Thesis and Ph.D. Dissertation Prospectuses
If you are nearing the end of your first spring as an M.A. student or preparing for
your second (oral) candidacy exam as a Ph.D. student, you need to start thinking ahead
to the prospectus for your thesis or dissertation. The prospectus is a plan of action—not
an outline, but a description—that is required of graduate students in English before
they are allowed to begin writing a thesis or dissertation. It is vital that before
writing the prospectus, you do a great deal of research to make sure you are planning
an original project that does not repeat arguments published by other critics. M.A.
students should start researching the prospectus and building a working bibliography
during their first summer and discuss this work with their committee chair early in
their second fall semester. Ph.D. students normally write and defend their dissertation
prospectus as part of their second (oral) candidacy exam.
Purpose. Your prospectus is a crucial tool in three ways:
- A prospectus lets your committee know your initial ideas about your thesis or dissertation,
thus enabling them to help you fine-tune your plans—by, for example, suggesting additional
primary or secondary works for you to read, helping you figure out a more useful argumentative
structure, or telling you that you need to go back to the drawing board.
- It is likely that while writing your thesis or dissertation—and virtually certain
that while writing your dissertation—you will at times lose track of the overall shape
of your argument or the purpose of your project. At those times, it is a relief to
be able to consult your own prospectus, which can set you back on track and bring
order to the chaos of your thoughts. A good prospectus can serve this purpose even
when, as is often the case, you have changed various aspects of your initial plans
since writing the prospectus.
- Having written a prospectus will help you a great deal in the future, when you will have to write similar documents for potential book publishers, conference organizers, professional fellowship committees, and institutions that offer grants.
Length. The prospectus can be either about five pages (plus a bibliography) or about ten to thirty pages (plus a bibliography), depending on how much research you have done beforehand and the nature of your project. Only you and your director can decide which format will be most useful for you. Write the longer version if you believe that with little revision you will be able to use it as the introductory chapter of your thesis or dissertation. If you are not at the right stage in your research to produce an introductory chapter, choose the shorter version. (A ten-page introductory chapter might be an appropriate length for one chapter of a fifty-page M.A. thesis; a thirty-page introductory chapter might not be too long for a 200- to 400-page dissertation.)
Components of a Prospectus. Below is an annotated list of the normal components of a prospectus. Not every prospectus contains all of these components, but if you decide to omit any, discuss the omission with your advisor, first. If your thesis or dissertation is unusual in some way—say, if your research will consist mostly of classroom observation or if you will not be analyzing texts—your advisor may suggest a slightly different form for the prospectus. The nature of your project may lead you to change the order of these components or to combine some of them.
- Briefly explain your project. If you are writing an introductory chapter, you will
want to articulate the central argument or arguments of your thesis or dissertation,
but if you are writing the shorter form, you may want to stick to the traditional
expectation for a prospectus, which is that it will not state the writer’s argument.
The reasons for this are similar to those in the sciences: one cannot report scientific
results until the experiment is made; one can only advance an hypothesis and keep
one’s mind open. Similarly, the literary scholar cannot predict an argument until
the process of writing chapters has produced that argument. Whether or not you state
your central argument, however, you must go far beyond simply describing a topic.
Focus on describing the central issue that you wish to address in your thesis or dissertation—that
is, the problem with which you want to grapple. Your description of this issue should
be unique; it should not look like it could refer to any article or book previously
published by another scholar (or by yourself, for that matter).
- Describe what has been done before in this research area. The purpose of this part
of your prospectus is not to summarize entire articles or books by other scholars,
nor is it to demonstrate how much you have read. Instead, the purpose is to indicate
that you are entering an ongoing scholarly conversation and that you have something
new and useful to offer to that conversation. If no other scholar has ever written
about the author whose work you are going to address, you can still point to scholars
who have asked related questions, who have addressed authors’ writings in similar
genres in the same historical period, or the like.
- State explicitly how your approach to your issue or authors will differ from what
has been done before, and explain how your work will contribute usefully to the body
of literary or rhetorical scholarship. You do not need to claim that your project
represents a mind-blowingly new development in the history of literary or rhetorical
criticism; still less do you need to claim that all scholars before you have been
nitwits. Again, remember that literary and rhetorical scholarship are collections
of conversations and that your responsibility is to write something that will carry
at least one of those conversations forward in a fresh way. (Remember, too, that within
a very few years you are quite likely to meet some of the scholars to whom you refer.
You want them to be interested in what you have to say even when you are strongly
disagreeing with them.)
- Explain what your methodology will be. You need not espouse one “-ism,” and indeed,
most literary scholars these days use parts of at least two or three sorts of theory.
The aim of this part of your prospectus is to demonstrate to your committee that you
have not simply defaulted to the one type of theory you know; instead, you have thoughtfully
chosen to use certain methodologies because you believe they will be the most useful
in addressing the particular topic and issue you have chosen.
- List and describe each of the chapters of your work. You needn’t have chapter titles
yet, and again, you probably will not want to list the central argument of each chapter.
(If you are writing your prospectus as an introductory chapter, you may want to list
the central argument of each chapter, but you will probably have to come back and
revise that portion of your introduction heavily after writing the entire thesis or
dissertation.) Here, it is particularly important not only to describe the anticipated
topic of each chapter (e.g., “painful self-awareness in Wuthering Heights”) but also to describe its issue—the literary-critical problem that it is addressing.
If you describe only a topic for each chapter, you will likely find yourself writing
in circles a few months from now, as you realize that you are answering some of the
same questions in your second chapter that you answered in your first. Putting a great
deal of thought into this part of your prospectus now will save you a great deal of
anxiety, frustration, and even panic later on.
- Attach a Working Bibliography several pages long, impeccably proofread and formatted according to MLA or APA guidelines. You need not have read everything listed in the bibliography, and it is expected that you will both delete and add items later on while writing the thesis or dissertation. However, you should have read at least parts of most of the items on your list, enough to have a shrewd idea that they will be useful to your project. List both primary and secondary works. Your bibliography may consist of one list, or you may separate it into categories of some sort—e.g., all works pertaining to one of your authors, then all pertaining to another of your authors; or primary works and then secondary works; or works addressing rhetorical aspects of your project and then works addressing political aspects. You need not annotate your bibliography, though if you include a work that might look out of place, unscholarly, or otherwise odd to your committee members, you can always add a sentence of explanation at the end of the entry.
SharePoint Site
The Graduate Program in English has a secure SharePoint site that can be accessed by current graduate students in the Department of English. M.A.
students can access the site to review sample thesis prospectuses that have been developed
by past M.A. students and approved by department faculty. Ph.D. students can access
the site to review sample written-exam reading lists that have been compiled by former
Ph.D. students and approved by the department faculty. Ph.D. students also can access
the site to review sample questions that department faculty have used on past written
exams. Finally, Ph.D. students can access the site to review sample dissertation prospectuses
that have been developed by past Ph.D. students and approved by department faculty.
**Please contact the Associate Director of Graduate Studies to be given access to this site.**