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MFA Comprehensive Exam

As a required component of the UNM MFA degree, students must pass a written comprehensive exam. This comprehensive exam is NOT a series of “comps,” like the ones required for a doctoral program in literature. The MFA comprehensive exam takes the form of a craft essay, in which the candidate:

  • Indicates the form of the dissertation they plan to write. (A book-length memoir; a collection of poems or stories; an essay collection, etc.)
  • Discusses the work produced in the program so far which will likely be included in the dissertation and “forecasts” the direction of future work.
  • Discusses particular influences and the larger tradition in which they hope to participate.

NOTE: The comprehensive exam is an advanced view of the dissertation, and should in no way limit the final form or content. It’s understood that this summary and discussion will change and evolve substantially as the students write and revise and complete their dissertation.

The following prompts should be taken as suggestions and not prescriptions. Don’t feel that you need to respond to each or, even any one in particular. Our hope is that the list below will help you to produce a prose account of your work so far, your growth as an artist during your time in our program, and your larger hopes and goals for the dissertation. The form of the essay should be organic and up to you. Don’t feel that the tone of your “comprehensive exam” should be stiff or scholarly or unfunny.

Discuss any of the following prompts. With the craft elements below, feel free to address craft choices in individual stories, poems, essays, or across the proposed dissertation as a whole. Again, what follows is not an exhaustive list.

  • structure
  • voice
  • tone
  • persona
  • figurative language
  • rhythm
  • meter
  • characterization
  • point of view
  • diction
  • time management
  • plot
  • distance (temporal, psychic, dramatic, etc.)
  • levels of particularity and specificity
  • resistance
  • narrative modes (summary, exposition, dramatization, compression, etc.)
  • the function of image and imagery (as ornamentation, status detail, and central vessel of meaning, etc.)
  • What craft elements have come most naturally? What have you struggled with?
  • What are your work’s principal thematic concerns?
  • What do you look for in good writing and how is what you've done an attempt to model these things?
  • Influences: books, specific stories, poems, essays, criticism, authors, courses. Feel free to quote other works, attempting to demonstrate the relationship between influence and what you’ve produced.
  • How does your work participate in a tradition of books, authors, ideas?
  • What are your artistic goals beyond the degree?

Length: 10-25 pages. Double-spaced. 12 point font.

NOTE: Typically, full-time students in the program will form their Committee on Studies early in their third semester. The chair of this committee will mentor and guide the student in the writing and revising of their comprehensive exam. (This includes filing an “Announcement of Examination” form with OGS.) Later in the same semester, at a date decided upon together by the student and the committee, the comprehensive exam will be evaluated by the committee, and if the exam passes, the student will begin dissertation hours (ENG 699) the following semester.

(Typically, the Committee on Studies becomes the Dissertation Committee, and the Chair of the Committee on Studies becomes the Chair of the Dissertation Committee—though this does not have to be the case.)

ANOTHER NOTE: Students may be enrolled in 699 prior to passing the comprehensive exam, but in order for those 699 hours to count, the student must pass their comprehensive exam in the same semester. (This applies to many “limbo students”* now enrolled in their third or fourth year in the graduate creative writing program.)

YET ANOTHER NOTE: The “Committee” referred to above are friendly people, invested in the student’s writing, and in no way resemble characters in a Kafka story.

* students who find themselves in the well-managed transition from the distinguished UNM MA in Creative Writing to the even more distinguished MFA in Creative Writing.

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