The M. A. in English program requires that you take a written M. A. Exam. The M. A. Exam is administered in October and March every year, and students usually take the exam in their last full semester before completion of the program. In the exam, you are responsible for the reading list of your emphasis or concentration.

Children's Literature Concentration
Aristotle, Poetics
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Virginia Hamilton, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush
Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Literature Emphasis
Aristotle, Poetics
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
William Butler Yeats, "Who Goes With Fergus?" (1892),
"Easter 1916" (1916), " The Second Coming" (1920), "Leda and the Swan" (1924),
"Among School Children" (1927), "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927), and "Crazy Jane
Talks to the Bishop" (1933)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
William Wordsworth, Excerpts from The Prelude (1805 text) Book 1, ll. 271-end;
Book 4, ll. 247-end; Book 6, ll. 332-end; Book 10, ll. 689-727; Book 13, all
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Applied Language Studies Emphasis
Aristotle, Rhetoric
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Plato, Phaedrus
Edward Sapir, Language
Calvert Watkins, Historical IE [American Heritage Dictionary 1st Edn]
Jean Aitchinson, Words in the Mind
Marcyliena Morgan, ed., Language and the Social Construction of Reality in Creole Situations
Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind
Ronald Wardhaugh, Sociolinguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language

Rhetoric and Composition Emphasis
Aristotle, Rhetoric
Plato, Phaedrus
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: "Definition of Man"
James Britton, Language and Learning
Shirley Heath, Ways with Words
I.A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries
Ann Berthoff, Making of Meaning
North, On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays 1975-1998
Making of Knowledge in Composition

Technical and Professional Writing Concentration
Aristotle, Rhetoric
Plato, Phaedrus
Elizabeth Tebeaux, The Emergence of a Tradition: Technical Writing in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science.
Linda Flower, The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing
Carolyn Miller, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40, 1979: 610-617
Ed. Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockman, and Carolyn Miller. "What's Technical about Technical Writing?" New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Farmingdale, NY: Baywood, 1983. 227-50.
David Dobrin, Theory, Research, Practice.
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: "Definition of Man"