Exam Reading
Almost every PhD, to my knowledge, has a “comprehensive exam” component. This exam is meant to help the graduate student gain a foundational knowledge in the field, prepare them to add to that knowledge in their dissertation, and test them on their comprehension. For most humanities degrees, this means reading a lot, thinking a lot, and writing a lot.
For UConn’s English department, that knowledge formation comes in the form of creating two lists of 60–75 books that encompass a known “field.” You then go through a reading process of engaging with those 120–150 books, learning what has been said and what still has to be said in that field. After the reading period, the PhD student’s committee (usually three faculty members related to those fields) write questions that the student then responds to in essays. Each exam gets a 24-hour period in which to respond to the question in a 10–15 page(ish) essay (e.g., you receive the questions at 8 a.m. and an essay response is due the next day at 8 a.m.). Once two essays have been written on each field, the third exam is a synthesis of the two fields (in my case, I’m choosing an oral rather than written exam, in which my committee and I will have a conversation about the two fields and how they engage with each other).
I’m hoping to write and publish on this blog some responses to my reading. The exam process can be a very lonely time, when you spend most of your day holed up in a corner, reading complex ideas and thinking about how all of them connect. I think best through writing, so I’m going to share some thoughts on this blog.
In this post, I want to share my two fields. So, you’ll find my reasoning and the books I’ll be reading below (well, the books I’ll be reading for my exams… I’ll still be reading others books for other projects too). You can also subscribe to my email newsletter, which will send you these posts (it might take a little to set it up… so don’t expect instant emails).
I’m starting in on the law and literature section, since that field is still relatively new to me. I’m making my way through Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables right now (wondering half the time why I chose such a large book to begin with…)
Field 1: Utopian and Dystopian Literature
This exam list surveys utopian and dystopian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With its roots set in the early twentieth century, the list focuses on tracking the genre and field from mostly the 1970s to present, holding to what I call totalitarian, bureaucratic, or governmental utopias and dystopias. By this specification I mean each text generally contains a city or community with rules, ordinances, and regulations that conserve its utopian or dystopian leanings. Without a central governing body, utopia becomes paradisaic, Edenic, or pastoral, while dystopia becomes apocalyptic, wasteland, or nightmare.
The emphasis on totalitarian, bureaucratic, or governmental utopias and dystopias supports my dissertation project. In my dissertation, I want to look at how characters use agency and power within the constrained system that is the utopia or dystopia. As such, this list provides me with a selection of authors who have created just such thought, while staying away from texts that might be deemed utopian and dystopian due to politics, methods, or visions. This focus also means that I am not quite asking a text about how it is utopian but rather what is happening within the utopia and how it effects the people there.
A few clusters of utopian and dystopian thought appear in the primary texts. For example, most of the texts before 1950 would be considered, in this case, foundational to and influential on the rest of the list. Zamyatin’s We can be seen throughout the work of Huxley, Orwell, and Atwood, while Gilman’s Herland is taken up again in the work of Tiptree, Jr., Slonczewski, Sargent, Tepper, and Griffith. Much of the list centers around the 1970s feminist utopias, while also pulling that strand of gender through later texts like James’s The Children of Men. The end of the primary text tends toward young adult literature (e.g., Anderson, Lowry, DuPrau, Collins, Condie, Roth, and Shusterman) because I hope to uncover a “YA turn” for the field in which the earlier works are echoed in and expanded upon in this specific genre; in addition, the end of the list contains some sequels and more contemporary ideations on utopia and dystopia.
The secondary texts establish broadly the highlights of utopian theory. Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, while not directly about utopia, provides the rich science fictional theory of cognitive estrangement and novum that the later utopian canonical authors (e.g., Moylan, Levitas, Sargent, Jameson) pull on to understand how the speculation in utopian and dystopian literature works. Most criticism and theoretical texts on the genre emphasize the utopian, while few focus on the dystopian. This is a gap in the field that I hope my emphasis on dystopian over utopian can bridge. Some of the entries on the list also expand utopian theory into the broader conversations around literature, applying the theory not just within the genre but across texts that might not seem at first glance to be utopian.
This list supports my dissertation project by examining a general knowledge about utopian and dystopian literature. My dissertation project will be analyzing utopia and dystopia as a way to innovate the communal theorizations agency and consent in legal settings, and as such, this list provides me with a look at the general field my work will be in conversation with.
Primary Texts
H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, 1905.
E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” 1909.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, 1915.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1924.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932.
Katherine Burdekin, Swastika Night, 1937.
Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1953.
David Karp, One (Escape to Nowhere), 1953.
Philip K. Dick, “The Minority Report,” 1956.
Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars, 1956.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958.
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962.
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962.
William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run, 1967.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” 1973.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974.
Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to the End of the World, 1974.
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, 1975.
Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton, 1976.
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976.
James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” 1977.
Anthony Burgess, 1985, 1978.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 1985.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985.
Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean, 1986.
Barry B. Longyear, Sea of Glass, 1986.
Pamela Sargent, The Shore of Women, 1986.
Sheri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country, 1988.
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite, 1992.
P. D. James, The Children of Men, 1992.
Flynn Connolly, Rising of the Moon, 1993.
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993.
Lois Lowry, The Giver, 1993.
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents, 1998.
M. T. Anderson, Feed, 2002.
Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember, 2003.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 2004.
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, 2008.
Ally Condie, Matched, 2010.
Veronica Roth, Divergent, 2011.
Hugh Howey, Wool, 2011.
Dave Eggers, The Circle, 2013.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe, 2016.
Naomi Alderman, The Power, 2016.
Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God, 2017.
N. K. Jemisin, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” 2018.
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, 2019.
Justin Cronin, The Ferryman, 2023.
Secondary Texts
Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre, 1970.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 1979.
Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice, 1982.
Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Volrath, 1984.
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, 1986 (2014)
Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 1990.
Krishan Kumar, Utopianism, 1991.
Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37.
M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism, 1994.
Jennifer Burwell, Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation, 1997.
Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction, 1998.
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature, 1999.
Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, 2000.
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, 2001.
Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, 2002.
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2005.
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions, 2013.
Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, 2013.
Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, 2016.
Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History, 2017.
Sean Austin Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature, 2017.
Tom Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformations, 2020.
S. D. Chrostowska, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics, 2021.
Field 2: Law and Literature
The modern study of law and literature began in the 1970s with the publication of James B. White’s The Legal Imagination. The study of law and literature is an intersectional field that has four nodes of emphasis: the law as literature (e.g., reading judicial opinion, legislative articles, etc. as narratives and genres); literature that represents the legal profession (e.g., investigations, court procedures, lawyers, etc.); literature about legal philosophies (e.g., justice, mercy, restoration, retribution, jurisprudence, etc.); and laws about literature (e.g., copyright, salaciousness, obscenity, lewdness, pornography, etc.). This comprehensive exam list focuses on the first three nodes, emphasizing the scholarly study of law and literature, core fictional texts used to understand the interaction, and select legal cases chosen for their engagement with various themes.
The comprehensive exam list begins with secondary texts about the field because the conversations in the field emphasize the intersection and discussion at that intersection of law and literature rather than asserting a canonical list of fictional texts to study and converse about. Indeed, the field of law and literature has more to do with the and and trying to understand what the intersection means than with determining a core set of texts that form a historical, thematic, or generic conversation. The foundational secondary texts, then, cover theoretical works on justice (e.g., Rawls, Dworkin, and Ziolkowski), analyses of the legal profession or legality in literature (e.g., Weisberg, Thomas, and Brooks), and arguments about the field of law and literature itself (e.g., Posner and Olson).
Supplemental to these foundational secondary texts are ten foundational primary texts. Because my emphasis is twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, I chose works that are influential on American literature and the American sense of justice (e.g., Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Kafka) or represented different forms of American legal literature (e.g., Lee, Capote, and Grisham), while also including a few American historical choices because of their use in teaching courses of law and literature (e.g., Melville, Twain, and Glaspell). The lens of the law can be applied to many, if not all, texts, and as such, I have chosen these as exemplars that give a survey of the possibilities within this field.
Law and literature can engage in various thematic approaches to the subject: for example, race, the law, and representation is an active and lively conversation in the field. My emphasis for my doctoral research and dissertation is American law and sexual justice literature. As such, I tailored the final part of this list to represent two themes within sexual justice literature—(1) abortion and autonomy; (2) consent, sexual violence, and a right to sex. While there are more themes that could be chosen, I believe these two will support most the work I am currently doing:
Abortion and autonomy contains seven primary fictional texts about abortion from across the political spectrum, the two supreme court cases at the heart of the arguments about the legalization of abortion, and four secondary texts about the history of abortion in the United States.
Consent, sexual violence, and a right to sex contains seventeen primary texts of fiction, memoir, or journalistic reporting that engage the individual and communal rights about sex and track the arc of popular conversation around consent that centers on the #MeToo Movement but also expands to other nodes in US history when consent became cultural conversation, three supreme court cases that outline the right to privacy that legally protects the right to sex, and nine secondary texts that track key theoretical conversations about sexual consent and the legal right to sex.
Taken together, these two themes represent a selection of a literary conversation about the use of consent in legislation, the arguments around bodily control and a community’s investment in those bodies, and the work still needed for sexual justice in America.
Foundational Law and Literature Secondary Texts
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971.
James B. White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression, 1973.
Richard H. Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction, 1984.
James B. White, When Words Lose Their Meaning, 1984.
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, 1986.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, 1987.
James B. White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law, 1989.
Richard H. Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, 1992.
David Luban, Legal Modernism, 1994.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and the Public Life, 1997.
Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, 1997.
Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises, 1997.
Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg, Literary Criticisms of Law, 2000.
Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, 2001.
Peter Fitzpatrick, Modernism and the Grounds of Law, 2001.
Barry R. Schaller, A Vision of American Law: Judging Law, Literature, and the Stories We Tell, 2001.
Anthony G. Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner, Minding the Law, 2002.
Paul W. Kahn, The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America, 2002.
Richard K. Sherwin, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture, 2002.
Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witness: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, 2007.
Brian Z. Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law, 2009.
Richard Posner, Law and Literature, 3rd edition, 2009.
Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: Restorative Justice for Our Times, 2015.
Greta Olson, From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, 2022.
Foundational Law and Literature Primary Texts
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 1866.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, 1891/1924.
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894.
Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers,” 1917.
Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925.
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” 1948.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960.
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966.
John Grisham, A Time to Kill, 1989.
American Law and Sexual Justice Literature
Abortion and Autonomy
Primary Texts
Alice Walker, Meridian, 1976.
John Irving, The Cider House Rules, 1985.
Charles Colson, Gideon’s Torch, 1995.
Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs, 2017.
Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light, 2018.
Leni Zumas, Red Clocks, 2018.
Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street, 2022.
Legal Texts
Roe v. Wade, 1973.
Dobbs v. Jackson, 2022.
Secondary Texts
Rosalind Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, 1986 (updated, 2024).
Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, 1996.
Carol Mason, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics, 2002.
Joshua Prager, The Family Roe: An American Story, 2021.
Consent, Sexual Violence, and a Right to Sex
Primary Texts (Fiction, Memoir, Autobiography, Journalism)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970.
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974.
Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power: A Memoir, 1998.
Louise Erdrich, The Round House, 2012.
Rose McGowan, BRAVE, 2018.
Miriam Toews, Women Talking, 2018.
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, 2019.
Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir, 2019.
Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, 2019.
K. M. Szpara, Docile, 2020.
Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, 2021.
Annabel Lyon, Consent, 2021.
Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons, 2022.
Christine Blasey Ford, One Way Back: A Memoir, 2024.
Legal Texts
Loving v. Virginia, 1967.
Lawrence v. Texas, 2003.
Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015.
Secondary Texts
David Archard, Sexual Consent, 1997.
Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to Present, 2008.
Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 2015.
Linda Martin Alcoff, Rape and Resistance, 2018.
Joseph J. Fischel, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice, 2019.
Alexandra Brodsky, Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash, 2021.
Anita Hill, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence, 2021.
Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, 2021.
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, 2022.
