Oral Exam List
Literary Theory
From Leitch et al – The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010).
Friedrich Nietzsche--“On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense”
Mikhail Bakhtin – “Discourse in the Novel”
Ferdinand de Saussure – From Course in General Linguistics
Roman Jakobson – “Two Aspects of Language”; “Linguistics and Politics”
J. L. Austin – “Performative Utterances”
Jacques Lacan – “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – “Introduction: Rhizome”; “What Is a Minor Literature?”
Antonio Gramsci – “The Formation of the Intellectuals”
Walter Benjamin – “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”
Louis Althusser – “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Michel Foucault – “What Is an Author”
Jacques Derrida – “Plato's Pharmacy”
Julia Kristeva – from Revolution in Poetic Language
Jean-François Lyotard – “Defining the Postmodern”
Gayle Rubin – “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”
Laura Mulvey – “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Edward Said – From Orientalism, “Jane Austen and Empire”
Paul Gilroy – “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”
Pierre Bourdieu – From Distinction, and from The Rules of Art
W. K. Wimsatt Jr. & Monroe C. Beardsley – “The Intentional Fallacy”
Roland Barthes – “The Death of the Author”; “From Work to Text”
Jürgen Habermas – “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”
Monique Wittig– “One Is Not Born a Woman”
Donna Haraway– “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels– “Against Theory”
Additional Works
Theodor Adorno, “Lyric and Society”
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar”
Alain Badiou, Ethics
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Introduction” to Rabelais and his World
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Homi Bhabha, “Nation and Narration”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, chaps 1 and 2
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”
Jacques Derrida, “Différance”; Writing and Difference
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter 6 ; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Henry Louis Gates, “The Signifying Monkey”
John Guillory, Cultural Capital, chapters 1 and 4
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”; “The Question of Technology”
Frederic Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Postmodernism”; The Political Unconscious
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Jacques Lacan, “The Significance of the Phallus” (complete); “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” (complete)
Jacques Lacan et al., The Purloined Poe
György Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”; “Narrate or Describe?”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part 1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , Epistemology of the Closet
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology