AP English Literature and Composition

AP English Literature and Composition is a college-level secondary-school course and examination administered by the College Board that evaluates students' abilities to analyze and interpret literature from a variety of historical periods and national traditions. The course connects close reading of dramatic, poetic, and prose texts by authors such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, and Gabriel García Márquez to analytic writing and argumentation assessed on a national scale. Instructors often situate texts alongside contexts involving figures like Harold Bloom, T. S. Eliot, New Criticism, Northrop Frye, and institutions such as the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Course overview

The course foregrounds literary study through canonical and diverse works by writers such as Homer, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Molière, Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Edgar Allan Poe, Beowulf, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus—balancing ancient, early modern, and contemporary exemplars to develop interpretive sophistication.

Curriculum and exam structure

The curriculum emphasizes close reading, literary analysis, and composition drawing on methodologies associated with Formalism, New Criticism, Reader-response criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Feminist literary criticism, Marxist criticism, and Postcolonialism, with classroom materials often referencing theorists like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The exam comprises multiple-choice sections testing recognition of poetic forms, narrative voice, and rhetorical strategies, and free-response sections requiring timed essays modeled on prompts about works by authors such as Shakespeare (e.g., Hamlet), Austen (e.g., Pride and Prejudice), Morrison (e.g., Beloved), Joyce (e.g., A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and García Márquez (e.g., One Hundred Years of Solitude). College Board updates and exam administrations intersect with organizations like the Educational Testing Service historically involved in standardized assessment practices and policy discussions involving the U.S. Department of Education.

Skills and pedagogy

Students practice analytic close reading, thesis-driven essaying, and evidence-based argumentation referencing features such as diction, syntax, imagery, meter, narrative perspective, and intertextuality found in works by John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, A. E. Housman, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Isabel Allende, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Cade Bambara, Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Pedagogical strategies draw on model curricula from state departments of education, professional development offered by the National Writing Project, workshops by the College Board, and resources from scholarly journals such as PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, and Studies in English Literature.

Scoring and college credit

Exams are scored on a 1–5 scale with essays evaluated by trained readers—often faculty from institutions like Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and New York University—under College Board scoring guidelines. Many colleges and universities including Boston University, University of Florida, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, and Rice University may grant credit or placement for scores of 3, 4, or 5, though credit policies vary by institution and by departments such as undergraduate humanities divisions and English departments chaired by scholars influenced by figures like Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom.

Preparation and resources

Students prepare using anthologies and editions from publishers and series associated with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Norton Anthology of English Literature, Bedford/St. Martin's, Penguin Classics, Faber and Faber, and Vintage Books, alongside study guides from Barron's Educational Series, Princeton Review, Khan Academy materials developed in partnership with the College Board, and summer seminars offered by institutions like Yale Summer Session, Oxford University Summer School, Cambridge Summer School, Bread Loaf School of English, and programs at liberal arts colleges such as Williams College and Amherst College. Supplemental supports include online archives and databases hosted by Project Gutenberg, JSTOR, The British Library, Library of Congress, Google Books, and digital humanities projects affiliated with universities such as Stanford, MIT, and University of Virginia.

Category:Advanced Placement courses