Languages:
The student should have a good reading knowledge of the languages of choice; this involves at least two foreign languages, since one of the literatures may be English. It is strongly urged that she or he acquire fluency in speaking one of the foreign languages, especially if a concentration in a foreign language is chosen.

Courses:
The student normally takes 12 courses during her or his doctoral study . The student selects the courses in consultation with the Special Committee. Of the total number of courses, 10 must be taken for a grade.

Teaching:
Each candidate is required to do at least one year of classroom teaching.

The Second-Year Review and Examinations:
The Second-Year Review. This review is intended to enable students to begin focusing on the topics and the fields of research that will form the basis of their A-exams. To help ensure a substantive and constructive meeting with their special committees, students will prepare a relatively brief statement of research interests and proposed areas of course work up to the A-exam and will supply a piece of writing that represents the current or future shape of their research. The writing sample would consist of previously written work and would not be an essay newly composed for this meeting; it might be a section of a recently completed seminar paper, not necessarily the entire essay. One purpose of the statement would be to reflect on the place of this writing sample in the constellation of a student's interests: to address its relation to future work, to frame it as part of a coherent project, or to use it as a springboard to discuss the comparatist parameters of the anticipated research. The review would take place in the third term as a precondition of registering for the fourth term of courses.

The A-exam:
The purpose of the A-exam is twofold: first, to certify the student’s competence in his or her fields of specialization, particularly with a view to preparing the student to seek employment in a single-language department, and second, to lay the foundations for the dissertation. Scholarship in Comparative Literature is increasingly interdisciplinary and includes a variety of language areas, each with its own disciplinary protocols. The fields of specialization are thus determined by each student in consultation with the Special Committee, which is also the ultimate arbiter of the nature and content of the A exam questions. The fields often entail concentration in a particular period of the major literature, emphasis on a particular genre and on theoretical or methodological approaches.

The following examples from recently completed A exams roughly follow this pattern:

1. first field: English modernist novel
second field: German modernist novel
third field: Psychoanalysis and deconstruction

2.first field: Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Modernism
second field: Harlem renaissance
third field: Postcolonial theory and theories of modernity

Student programs with a more prominently interdisciplinary focus might configure the fields somewhat differently, as in the following examples:

1.first field: Melodrama in Hindi film and television
second field: Salman Rushdie and postcolonial theory
third field: Theories of global modernity

2 first field: Modernism/Postmodernism
second field: German and Spanish 20th century experimental novel
third field: Literature, Painting and the Body

The fields, typically three in number, form the basis of three reading lists. For each list, the student drafts a question which is the starting point of an essay. The essays can range from a survey of a field to a focused analysis that functions as a dry run for a dissertation chapter. Once the essay portion of the exam is completed, an oral exam is scheduled. The A-exam must be taken before the student's seventh term of residence.

Dissertation:
The student must complete an acceptable dissertation. The work is directed by the chair of his or her Special Committee and must be approved by all members of the Special Committee.

The B-exam:
This oral examination deals with the dissertation. It is administered by the Special Committee

Appendix:
Recommended Timeline from the A-exam to the Job Market.
click here for a pdf file