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In Brief

This is the “field” list for my comprehensive exam, with links to my own reading notes.

It is 35 “work units” long (countable by searching “work Unit1” without a space), as defined in my program’s PhD Program Handbook.

Book title links go to OpenLibrary’s listings, and article title links go to the most open article versions I can find.

Rationale

Spanning from 1922 to 1998, the works on this list represent a range of modernist and postmodernist genres. Among them are satirical novels (Babbitt), protest novels (Native Son), experimental novels (the U.S.A. trilogy), science fiction television with postmodern elements (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and memoirs (Close to the Knives).

In putting together the list, the themes of the built environment and spatial/social mobility emerged. Agency over one’s own body and the ability to traverse space unimpeded by social restrictions—or the marked lack thereof—appears throughout all of these works. These themes lead to the inclusion of some of the critical works, such as Jurca’s, Miller’s, Rothstein’s, and Soja’s work. A similar theme arose through the tension between ensemble works and novels that hew toward a single character’s perspective, closer to a traditional bildungsroman. For instance, the U.S.A. trilogy, Generation X, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine do not strongly present a single character’s perspective. Other works, such as Babbitt, Native Son, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Kindred, and Close to the Knives, revolve far more clearly around the experiences of a single character. The ways that racialized and/or minoritized authors write about their experiences informed the inclusion of the less “literary” critical works such as those by Appiah, Gross, Lipsitz, and Mills.

Fiction

  1. Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. 1979. Beacon Press, 2004. (287 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  2. ———. Parable of the Sower. 1993. Grand Central Publishing, 2019. (368 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  3. ———. Parable of the Talents. 1998. Grand Central Publishing, 2019. (448 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  4. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. St. Martin’s Press, 1991. (192 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  5. ———. Microserfs. Harper Perennial, 2008. (400 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  6. Dos Passos, John. 42nd Parallel. 1930. Mariner Books, 2000. (352 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  7. ———. 1919. 1932. Mariner Books, 2000. (400 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  8. ———. The Big Money. 1936. Mariner Books, 2000. (464 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  9. Himes, Chester. If He Hollers, Let Him Go. 1947. Da Capo Press, 2002. (224 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  10. Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. 1922. Oxford UP, 2010. (368 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  11. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Vintage, 1990. (352 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  12. Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington Square Press, 1990. (240 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  13. Okada, John. No-No Boy. 1957. University of Washington Press, 2014. (264 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  14. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 6. 1997–1998. Paramount app. (26 episodes. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  15. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, or, The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death. 1969. Modern Library, 1994. (240 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  16. Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Vintage, 1991. (288 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  17. Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. Harper Perennial, 2023. (544 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)

Theory & Criticism

T & C Books

  1. :ballot_box_with_check: Cecire, Natalia. Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019. (293 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  2. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1998. (556 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  3. Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Duke UP, 1993. (459 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  4. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. (438 pp. workUnit1 + workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  5. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton UP, 2001. (238 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  6. Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. U California P, 1989. (240 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  7. :ballot_box_with_check: Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1992. 1st Vintage ed., 2019. (91 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  8. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. (342 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)
  9. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. (266 pp. workUnit1.) (My public notes.)

T & C Articles

Batch One = workUnit1

  1. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, pp. 336–357. (21 pp.) (My public notes.)
  2. Calhoun, Jamie. “Reimagining the Self: Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association vols. 46/47, nos. 2/1, Fall 2013–Spring 2014, pp. 37--53. _JSTOR_. (27 pp.) (My public notes.)
  3. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Agency in the Discursive Condition.” History and Theory vol. 40, no. 4, 2001, pp. 34–58. (24 pp.) (My public notes.)
  4. ———. “Beyond ‘The Subject’: Individuality in the Discursive Condition.” New Literary Theory vol. 31, no. 3, 2000, pp. 405–419. (14 pp.) (My public notes.)
  5. Eve, Martin Paul and Joe Street. “The Silicon Valley Novel.” Literature & History vol. 28, no. 1, 2018, pp. 81–97. BIROn: Birkbeck Institutional Research Online. (16 pp.) (My public notes.)

Batch Two = workUnit1

  1. Foster, Tim. “‘A Kingdom of a Thousand Princes but No Kings’: The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs.” Western American Literature vol. 46, no. 3, 2011, pp. 302–324. Project Muse. (22 pp.) (My public notes.)
  2. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline & Punish. 1975. Translated by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed., Vintage, 1995. pp. 195–228. (33 pp.) (My public notes.)
  3. Gross, Ariela J. “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South.” The Yale Law Journal vol. 198, no. 1, 1998, pp. 109–188. JSTOR. (79 pp.) (My public notes.)
  4. Hutcheon, Linda. “Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism.” Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, ed. Edmund J. Smyth, 1991, pp. 105–122. TSpace. (17 pp.) (My public notes.)
  5. Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly vol. 47, no. 3, 1995, pp. 369–387. (18 pp.) (My public notes.)
  6. Mills, Charles W. “Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic.” The Body and the State: How the State Controls and Protects the Body, Part 1, special issue of Social Research vol. 78, no. 2, summer 2011, pp. 583–606. JSTOR. (24 pp.) (My public notes.)
  7. Yúdice, George. “The Privatization of Culture.” Social Text no. 59, 1999, pp. 17–34. (17 pp.) (My public notes.)

Reading Progress

Started: 2024-04-22
Last updated: 2025-03-15
Amount read: 2 of 35 works.

2 works
  • :seedling: = emerging note
  • :herb: = established note
  • :evergreen_tree: = evergreen note
  • open access = open access
  • :closed_lock_with_key: = paywalled
  • general web link = general web link

Kudos

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