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Graduate Progam Information:
Marnie Leonard (970) 491-2403 Marnie.Leonard@colostate.edu

Graduate Study

The Literature Program Comprehensive Exam

Exams are offered at the beginning of each semester (August and January). The exam is held on a Saturday morning in the computer lab and is four hours long. Typically, most full time students will take their exam at the beginning of their third semester. Students must have successfully passed their comprehensive exams before they defend their theses/projects. This exam, for which you will prepare your own reading list, will ask questions about the history, content, and implications of literatures in English; it will assume that you are familiar with recent literary theories.

You should make your reading list with help from your advisor, your professors, past students’ lists on file in the department office, and the Literature program chairperson. You should have your final list approved 8 weeks before you take the exam, which means you should submit the first draft of the list to the chairperson of the literature program 12 weeks before the exam. For each of the following eleven categories, your list should include three works that are typically regarded as major or canonical and one work that would be considered minor or relatively unknown, for a total of 44 “works.” You should aim for a reasonable balance between male and female writers, among writers from different social, economic, ethnic, and cultural groups, among time periods within each category (i.e. do not have all your 19th c. British works come from the late Victorian era), and among the genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and literary non-fiction. What constitutes a “work” may be obvious (as in the case of a novel), but when it is not, you should put together an arguably equivalent body of material: for instance, a “work” might mean one long play (King Lear) or three short ones (the Oedipus trilogy); three ordinary-length short stories or essays; at least ten mid-length lyric poems (though a long one like T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland” might count for two or three); the Prologue and two tales from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; or one book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Categories

1. Classical in the broad sense, including Greek, Roman, Judaic-Christian, Asian and other early cultures
2. Medieval, focused on Britain
3. Renaissance, focused on Britain
4. Restoration and 18th Century, focused on Britain and Ireland
5. l9th-Century Britain and Ireland
6. 20th-Century Britain and Ireland
7. Pre-1800 U.S.
8. l9th-Century U.S.
9. 20th-21st Century U.S.
10. International literature in translation from cultural traditions other than U.S. and Britain.
11. Anglophone literature, that is, international literature originally in English but not from Britain or the US; this might include Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, and so forth.

• When listing each work, include the author’s complete name, the date of the work, and the genre.
• List titles of individual poems.
• For categories 1, 10, & 11, include the regional or national affiliation of the author or work.

Click here for an example of the exam.

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This information is not intended to replace your advisor or the information in the CSU General Catalog, the Class Schedule, or the Department Checksheets.

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