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AP English Literature & Composition

College-level literary analysis covering short fiction, poetry, drama, and the novel. Aligned to the College Board AP English Literature & Composition Course and Exam Description. Develops sophisticated literary interpretation and analytical writing.

14 Units

45-60 minutes per unit

What You Will Learn

College Board Aligned

Covers all AP English Literature CED units — from short fiction through longer fiction and literary argumentation.

Close Reading

Develop the deep reading skills that distinguish AP-level literary analysis from surface-level summary.

College Credit Potential

A qualifying AP exam score can earn 3-6 college credits (Intro to Literature equivalent) at most universities.

All Units

The Art of Reading Literature

Develop the close reading practices and interpretive habits essential to AP literary analysis.

•Apply close reading strategies to identify and interpret literary elements
•Distinguish between surface meaning and deeper thematic significance
•Recognize how authorial choices create meaning beyond plot
+1 more objectives

Character, Narrator, and Voice

Examine how authors construct characters and narrators, and how point of view shapes everything a reader knows and believes.

•Analyze direct and indirect characterization and their different effects
•Evaluate narrator reliability and identify the gap between what a narrator says and what the text implies
•Distinguish among narrative points of view and explain how each constrains and enables meaning
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Setting, Atmosphere, and Symbolic Landscape

Analyze how authors construct setting and atmosphere as vehicles of thematic meaning, not merely backdrop for action.

•Distinguish between setting as backdrop and setting as thematic vehicle
•Analyze how atmospheric details accumulate into emotional and symbolic significance
•Identify pathetic fallacy and other techniques by which landscape reflects interiority
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Structure, Form, and the Architecture of Narrative

Examine how authors shape stories through plot structure, pacing, chronological manipulation, and formal design — and why these choices matter for meaning.

•Analyze how narrative structure creates tension, expectation, and revelation
•Evaluate the effect of nonlinear narration, including flashback, flash-forward, and in medias res
•Identify how pacing — the speed at which narrative moves — produces meaning
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Figurative Language: Metaphor, Symbol, Irony, and Image

Master the figurative devices that carry the deepest literary meaning — metaphor, simile, symbol, allegory, imagery, and irony — and learn to analyze their effects with precision.

•Distinguish among metaphor, simile, symbol, and allegory and explain what each adds that literal language cannot
•Analyze how imagery patterns accumulate into thematic significance
•Identify the three forms of irony and explain how each creates interpretive complexity
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The Short Story: Craft, Compression, and the Telling Detail

Develop a deep analytical vocabulary for the short story form, examining how compression, the single effect, and the architecture of revelation work in fiction's most demanding genre.

•Analyze how the short story's compression creates unique demands on every element
•Identify and evaluate the 'single effect' as an organizing principle of short fiction
•Trace how a story's ending retrospectively reorganizes the reader's understanding
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Poetry Foundations: Sound, Meter, and Form

Build a working knowledge of meter, rhyme, sound devices, and poetic forms — the technical foundations that support sophisticated poetry analysis.

•Identify and scan common metrical patterns, including iambic pentameter and free verse
•Analyze how rhyme scheme and sound devices create meaning through sonic texture
•Explain how line breaks function as a uniquely poetic form of punctuation and emphasis
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Reading and Analyzing Poetry: Speaker, Tone, and Theme

Develop a systematic approach to close-reading poetry, focusing on speaker, occasion, tone, and thematic development as the interpretive architecture of a poem.

•Identify and characterize the poetic speaker and distinguish the speaker from the biographical author
•Analyze tone and explain how diction, imagery, and formal choices construct it
•Identify the occasion of a poem and explain how context shapes interpretation
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Drama: Staging, Soliloquy, and Dramatic Structure

Analyze drama as a distinct literary form — examining how dramatic structure, soliloquy, staging, and the tension between spoken and enacted meaning create theatrical significance.

•Analyze drama as a text designed for performance, not just reading
•Explain how soliloquy, aside, and dramatic irony create interpretive complexity
•Distinguish between classical tragedy and comedy and explain their formal conventions
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The Novel: Extended Narrative, Theme, and Literary Movements

Examine the novel as a literary form with unique capacities for sustained thematic development, world-building, and cultural reflection across major literary movements.

•Analyze how extended narrative develops themes across a full-length work
•Identify major literary movements (Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism) and explain their formal and thematic concerns
•Evaluate how a novel's structure — its chapters, sections, and narrative organization — shapes meaning
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Literary Criticism: Reading Through Critical Lenses

Explore the major critical frameworks — New Criticism, feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic — and practice using each as a productive analytical lens.

•Explain the foundational assumptions and central questions of five major critical schools
•Apply at least three critical frameworks to a single text and compare what each reveals
•Evaluate the limitations as well as the illuminations of each critical approach
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The Literary Analysis Essay: Structure, Thesis, and Evidence

Master the construction of a sophisticated literary analysis essay — from thesis formation through textual integration to revision — with direct reference to the AP exam rubric.

•Construct a defensible, specific, arguable thesis claim about a literary text
•Select and integrate textual evidence that directly supports analytical claims
•Develop coherent analytical paragraphs that connect evidence to interpretation to argument
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AP Prose Fiction Analysis FRQ: Strategies and Practice

Build mastery of the AP prose fiction FRQ through a systematic close reading method, annotated practice passages, and scored response models.

•Apply a systematic annotation and pre-writing process to an unseen prose passage
•Construct a focused, defensible thesis for a prose fiction analysis response
•Develop analytical paragraphs connecting specific prose techniques to the prompt's interpretive task
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AP Poetry Analysis FRQ: Strategies, Practice, and Exam Review

Develop mastery of the AP poetry analysis FRQ through systematic reading strategies, analytical writing practice, and comprehensive course review.

•Apply a layered annotation process to an unseen poem under timed conditions
•Construct a poetry analysis thesis that makes specific claims about how poetic techniques produce meaning
•Integrate analysis of sound, form, imagery, and speaker into a unified analytical argument
+1 more objectives

AP English Literature & Composition. College-level course aligned to College Board CED. Replaces English IV.