The
MA Oral Examination in Theory
(January 2008)
Students should read a
total of 12 works. Each
numbered item (sometimes consisting of several essays) counts as one
“work.” Begin by choosing one of the nine theoretical subfields
indicated below; then select twelve works from that list to represent the
field. Carefully considered
substitutions may be made with the approval of the appropriate faculty member.
CULTURAL STUDIES
1.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
“The Culture Industry”
2.
Richard Hoggart, The
Uses of Literacy
3.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950
4.
Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get
Working-Class Jobs
5.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgment of Taste
6.
Stuart Hall. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” and “Notes on Deconstructing
“The Popular”
7.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of
Style
8. Ien Ang, Watching
Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination
9.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life
10.
Angie McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture
11.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White, The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression
12. Michael Denning,
Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture
13.
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
14.
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance:
Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature or A Feeling for
Books: The Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire
15.
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular
Culture
16.
Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies”
17.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies
18.
Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
19.
Jackie Stacey, Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female
Spectatorship
20. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in
Black Cultural Studies
21.
John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value
FEMINIST THEORY
1.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
2.
Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected
Prose, 1979-1985 (5
essays, of which 1 must be “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”)
3.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” and “Thinking Sex”
4. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa,
eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color (in
entirety)
5.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
6.
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance:
Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
7.
Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (5 essays, including Lillian S.
Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon” and
Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”)
8.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (5 essays, one of which must be “This
Sex Which is Not One).
9.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” and
“Castration or Decapitation?”
10.
Patricia Erens, ed., Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism (5
essays, of which 1 must be Laura Mulvey, “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”)
11.
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender
12. Gloria
Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza
13.
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood:
The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
14.
Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction or Around 1981: Academic
Feminist Literary Theory
15.
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (5 essays, one of which must be “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”)
16.
Terry Castle, The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture
17.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal
Feminism
18.
Deborah McDowell, “The Changing Same”:
Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory
19.
Elizabeth Abel, ed., Female Subjects in Black and White:
Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (at least 5 essays)
20.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble or Bodies that Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex”
or Undoing Gender
21.
Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural
Geographies of Encounter
22.
Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public, and
the Private (3
essays chosen from among the following: Joan B. Landes,
“The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” Lauren Berlant, “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit
Material,” Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” Jennifer Wicke, “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the
Culture of Celebrity,” “Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public:
Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory, “ and
Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political
Formations.”)
23.
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist
Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change or The
Gender of Modernity, or Doing
Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (choose 1 book)
24.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity (5
essays, including “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses”)
25.
Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality
in Colonial Context
26. Hypatia 16:4 (Fall 2001) (special issue on
disability and feminism) (at least five essays)
27.
Ellen Samuels, "Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the
Question of Disability" (2002) and Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
"Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory" (2002) and
Catherine J. Kudlick, "Disability History,
Power, and Rethinking the Idea of `the Other'" (2005)
FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES
1.
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
2.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari
to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
3. Béla Balázs, Theory
of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art
4.
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1
5.
Cahiers du Cinéma, “John Ford’s Young
Mr. Lincoln”;
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”; Peter Wollen,
“The Autuer Theory,” from Signs and Meaning in the
Cinema
6.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man
7.
Christian Metz, The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema
8.
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures
9.
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision
10.
Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film
Theory Reader
(must include Colin MacCabe, “Theory and Film:
Principles of Realism and Pleasure”; Kaja Silverman,
“Suture”; Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of
the Cinematographic Apparatus” and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological
Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema”; Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body
and Space”; and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and
Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field”)
11.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio
Gettino: “Towards a Third Cinema”; Jim Pines and Paul
Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (must include Teshome
H. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films” and “Third Cinema
as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetic”; Haile
Gerima, “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs Lucy”)
12.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image OR
Cinema 2: The Time-Image
13.
Tom Gunning, “Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System”; “An Aesthetic of
Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator”; “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde”
14.
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the
“Frenzy” of the Visible;
“When the Woman Looks”; “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”
15.
Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen:
Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic ‘Presence’”; “Inscribing
Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation and Documentary”;
“Phenomenology and the Film Experience”
16.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger,
and Kristin Thompson, The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, Parts 1-3
17. Manthia Diawara, ed., Black
American Cinema
(must include Manthia Diawara,
“Black American Cinema: The New Realism” and “Black
Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance”; Jane Gaines, “Fire
and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux”;
Jacquie Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality: Towards Normalizing the
Black Cinematic Experience”; and bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black
Female Spectators”)
18.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, When
the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics
19.
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in
American Silent Film; “The
Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”;
“Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere”
20. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality:
Issues and Concepts in Documentary
21.
Richard Dyer, Stars
22.
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on
Screen
23.
Rick Altman, Film/Genre
24.
Lev Manovich, The
Language of New Media
1.
Karl Marx, The
German Ideology
2.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (selections)
3.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (selections) or “Commitment” or, with
Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry”
4.
Georg Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe?” and “The Ideology
of Modernism”; or The
Historical Novel
5.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations or Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism
6. Bertolt Brecht, “Organon for the
Theater”
7.
Fredric Jameson, ed. Aesthetics and Politics
8.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
9.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses”
10.
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary
Production
11.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
12.
J. Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere OR The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
13.
Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More
Progressive Union”
14.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic
15.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
16.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
17. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literature
18.
Nancy Fraser, “Justice Interruptus”:
Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist Condition”
Postcolonial Studies
1.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth or A Dying Colonialism
2. Aimé Césaire, Discourse
on Colonialism
3.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the
Colonized
4. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising
the Mind
5. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (at least 5 essays)
6. Ashis Nandy,
The Intimate Enemy
7.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back
8.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
9.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
10. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In
My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
11. Partha Chatterjee,
The Nation and Its Fragments
12. Homi K. Bhabha, The
Location of Culture
(entire book)
13.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
14. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes,
Literatures
15.
Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson,
eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (entire book)
16.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather
17. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity
at Large
18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
19. Aihwa Ong, Flexible
Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
20. Dipesh Chakrabarty , Provincializing Europe
21.
Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism:
An Historical Introduction
22. Achille Mbembe, On
the Postcolony
23.
Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial
Literary Studies (at
least 5 essays)
24.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism
without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
25. Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair, eds., Postcolonialisms (at least 5 essays, with most or all
by authors not otherwise included on your list)
1.
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (complete)
2.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (selection: “Being
and Time:
Introduction,” “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Letter on Humanism,” “The
Question Concerning Technology,” “Building Dwelling Thinking,” “What Calls for
Thinking?”)
3.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis
(complete)
4.
Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” and
Other Essays
(complete)
5.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
6.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
7.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément,
The Newly-Born Woman
8.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (complete)
9.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (complete)
10.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge
11.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language
12.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia
13.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
14.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’”
15.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault
16.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (complete)
17.
Michel Foucault, Power: Collected Writings, Vol. 3 (selection: “Truth and Juridical
Forms,” “Preface to Anti-Oedipus,” “Truth and Power,” “Governmentality,” “The Subject and Power,” “The Political
Technology of Individuals”)
18.
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics and Pure War
19. Slavoj Žižek, The
Sublime Object of Ideology
20.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak
Reader (at
least 5 essays)
22.
Hélène Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader (at least 5 essays)
23.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
25. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying
with the Negative
1.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
2.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), plus “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes” (1915), “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919) and “The Economic
Problem of Masochism” (1924)
3. Sigmund
Freud, choose three of the five case histories: “Fragment of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria” [aka Dora] (1905); “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year-Old”
[aka Little Hans] (1909); “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis” [aka Rat Man] (1909), “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia” [Schreber] (1911), and
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” [Wolf Man] (1918)
3.
Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein (in particular read “Infantile Anxiety
Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929) and
“The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930))