Here you will find the content of my personal reading lists for the qualifying examinations in my English PhD program. I studied for the 19th- and 20th-century American fields, and thus I have divided up this page into two centuries, organized alphabetically by author within each century, then chronologically by published date of each text. (Note: the 20th-century list only goes up to 1990.) Quite a few of the older works here are available online as e-texts in their entirety, so I've linked to those for your convenience.
Also, I should note that "literature" should be in scare quotes. These may have been the texts that I studied for exams in an English PhD program, but I can assure you that when many of these works were first published, they would have been considered "popular fiction" or something decidedly less high-falutin' than "literature." What was interesting to learn during my studies was how intensely some writers and critics struggled to define what was "literature," and how often an author's politics and social networks played a role in the publication and dissemination of the texts we today read from a distance as high culture. In many ways, the study of literature is as much about these politics and the history surrounding them as it is about anything else you might imagine coming from an English department. And I believe that the same dynamics are at work in today's book and publishing culture.
That said, I'm glad I was able to take the time to read many of these texts. Enjoy!
"I never lost as much but twice"; "I taste a liquor never brewed"; "Wild nights, wild nights"; "There's a certain slant of light"; "I felt a funeral in my brain"; "The soul selects her own society"; "A bird came down the walk"; "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"; "Much madness is divinest sense"; "I heard a fly buzz when I died"; "I like to see it lap the miles"; "The brain is wider than the sky"; "I dwell in possibility"; "Because I could not stop for death"; "My life has stood a loaded gun"; "A narrow fellow in the grass"; "Tell the truth but tell it slant"; "My life closed twice before its close" (1850-1886) - poems
Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) - political treatise
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale (1986) - novel
Baldwin, James
Notes of a Native Son (1955) - essay collection
Baraka, Amiri
"In Memory of Radio" (1961) - poem
"Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) - poem
"SOS"; "Black Art" (1969) - poems
"It's Nation Time" (1970) - poem
Barnes, Djuna
Nightwood (1936) - novel
Brooks, Gwendolyn
A Street in Bronzeville (1945) - poetry collection
"The Bean Eaters"; "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till"; "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi..."; "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock"; "We Real Cool" (1960) - poems
Brown, Sterling A.
"Memphis Blues"; "Slim Greer"; "Slim Lands a Job?"; "Slim in Atlanta" (1932) - poems
"Old Lem"; "Sharecroppers" (1980) - poems
Bulosan, Carlos
America Is in the Heart (1946) - novel
Butler, Octavia
Kindred (1979) - novel
Cather, Willa
My Ántonia (1918) - novel
The Professor's House (1925) - novel
Cha, Theresa Hak-Kyung
Dictée (1982) - poetry collection
Chestnutt, Charles W.
The Marrow of Tradition (1901) - novel
Cisneros, Sandra
The House on Mango Street (1983) - short story collection
Harmonium ("The Snow Man," "The Ordinary Women," "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "Anecdote of the Jar," "To the One of Fictive Music," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird") (1923) - poetry collection
"The Idea of Order in Key West" (1936) - poem
"Of Modern Poetry"; Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) - poems