50-Book Exam

Overview

On the day before the first day of classes, second-year Ph.D. students take the oral 50-Book Exam. All Ph.D. students must pass the 50-Book Exam within their first two years of study in order to fulfill the University's Qualification Exam requirement (section I.b of the Academic Rules for PhD Programs).

The 50-Book Exam requires students to demonstrate knowledge of a group of texts that is diverse in terms of historical period; generic and formal categories; national and geographic origin; and racial, gendered, and sexual identifications. Students work with a committee of three faculty members to create a list of 50 works, at least 30 of which should be from outside the student’s designated area of specialization. As this is a generalist exam aimed at building broad coverage of well-known literary, theoretical, and cinematic works, at least 35 of the 50 works on the list must come from the department’s 50-Book List.

Committees and Lists

In their spring semester, first-year Ph.D. students select one standing faculty member in the English Department to serve on their 50-Book Exam committee. Students may decide to ask their first-year advisor or another faculty member. If a faculty member declines for any reason, the student should approach another faculty member. If the student has any issues with deciding on or requesting a committee member, they should speak with the Grad Chair, who can suggest possible options.

Once the committee member has been selected, the student should provide the committee member's name to the Graduate Office, who will then assign the other two committee members and designate a chair. Please note: the committee member selected by the student is never the chair of the committee, and the two other committee members are faculty members in fields outside of the student's fields.

To prepare their exam list, the student will organize their selected 50 works into three broad rubrics according to Genre; Historical Period; and Theme or Theory. Each topic should provide a framework to structure the student's reading with works that speak to one another. Each of the three rubrics should also include one or two critical, theoretical, or historical works (books, articles, and other media).

The three rubrics are defined as follows: 

• Genre: At every stage of its history, literary studies has asked whether works of literature can and should be classified into distinct kinds, types, and forms. This rubric is an opportunity for students to enter that conversation by considering a recognizable genre or mode in the context of its development across different periods, places, languages, and/ or cultures. Topics may as broadly framed as drama, epic, romance, novel, or poetry. They may also be more specific, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric, pastoral, autobiography, melodrama, elegy, travel writing, naturalism, noir, the gothic, science fiction, and utopia. In every case, the rubric should be developed in a way that will allow the examinee to address the chosen topic in specific and general ways, paying attention to the formal character of the genre or mode at a particular place and time and to the changes that it undergoes as it evolves. 

• Historical Period: This framework invites students to explore the contours of a major literary-historical period, to understand how literary works are embedded in historical contexts. The period may be designated by literary historiography (seventeenth century, turn of the twentieth century) or literary movements (age of romanticism, modernism). The list of reading for this framework should include a range of genres and authors and, when useful, a transatlantic or transnational perspective. The rubrics should follow recognized periods, though these may be as broad as a long century or as narrow as several decades.

• Theme or Theory: This is the broadest category with the most leeway for the development of a specific interest. The topic should be focused enough to be easily understood and capacious enough to include a variety of texts across time periods, genres, and national traditions. Some thematic suggestions: literature and law, nature, representation of labor, war and literature, sexuality, gender, coming of age, slavery, figures of monstrosity, the body in pain, memory, empire. A theoretical concept should provide an optic or set of questions through which to interpret a variety of texts. A student may draw on notions that have been defined --or refined-- by specific thinkers, or a topic addressed by a variety of theorists to be used as theoretical or thematic handles. One might select a specific critical movement, e.g., Marxism, psychoanalysis, queer theory; or a concept, e.g., mimesis, hegemony, realism, pragmatism, power, racialization, the performative, subjectivity, orientalism, mourning, epistemology of the closet, bio-power, desire, the uncanny.

All or most of the works from the period chosen by the student should be included in the Historical Period list (i.e., not in the Genre or Theme/Theory lists) to prevent that period's overrepresentation in the exam as a whole; no more than 20 works from that period should appear on the full list. In other words, at least 30 of the 50 works should be outside of the student’s designated period of specialization.

All lists must be approved by the full 50-Book Committee before being submitted to the GEC for review by a date determined each year, typically in April. The GEC will read and provide feedback on all lists, but final approval of each list lies with the committee.

Exam Preparation

Students prepare for the exam in the summer following their first year. On the Monday before fall classes begin, students take a two-hour oral exam in which they discuss the works on their list in response to their exam committee’s questions. The committee will provide detailed feedback on the student's performance at the end of the exam and in a written report shared with the Grad Chair. The Grad Chair will then meet with the student at the beginning of the fall semester to discuss the feedback and make a plan for the upcoming year for filling in knowledge gaps and strengthening skills.

Eligibility

Per the Department's Good Standing policy, all first-year students must resolve any incompletes by June 1st in order to take the 50-Book Exam.

Should a student fail the 50-Book Exam, they are allowed to retake the exam with a new committee assigned by the GEC. The second exam must be scheduled no later than the end of the fall semester.