An AP English course in Literature and Composition should engage students in the careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students should deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. As they read, students should consider a work's structure, style, and themes as well as such smaller-scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.

Reading in an AP course should be both wide and deep. This reading necessarily builds upon the reading done in previous English courses. These courses should include the in-depth reading of texts drawn from multiple genres, periods, and cultures. In their AP course, students should also read works from several genres and periods-from the sixteenth to the twentieth century-but, more importantly, they should get to know a few works well. They should read deliberately and thoroughly, taking time to understand a work's complexity, to absorb its richness of meaning, and to analyze how that meaning is embodied in literary form. In addition to considering a work's literary artistry, students should consider the social and historical values it reflects and embodies. Careful attention to both textual detail and historical context should provide a foundation for interpretation, whatever critical perspectives are brought to bear on the literary works studied.

A generic method for the approach to such close reading involves the following elements: the experience of literature, the interpretation of literature, and the evaluation of literature. By experience, we mean the subjective dimension of reading and responding to literary works, including precritical impressions and emotional responses. By interpretation, we mean the analysis of literary works through close reading to arrive at an understanding of their multiple meanings. By evaluation, we mean both an assessment of the quality and artistic achievement of literary works and a consideration of their social and cultural values. All three of these aspects of reading are important for an AP course in English Literature and Composition. Moreover, each of the three aspects of reading corresponds to an approach to writing about literary works. Writing to understand a literary work may involve writing response and reaction papers along with annotation, free writing, and keeping some form of a reading journal.

Writing to explain a literary work involves analysis and interpretation, and may include writing brief focused analyses on aspects of language and structure. Writing to evaluate a literary work involves making and explaining judgments about its artistry and exploring its underlying social and cultural values through analysis, interpretation, and argument.

In short, students in an AP English Literature and Composition course should read actively. The works taught in the course should require careful deliberative reading. And the approach to analyzing and interpreting them should involve students in learning how to make careful observations of textual detail, establish connections among their observations, and draw from those connections a series of inferences leading to an interpretive conclusion about the work's meaning and value.

Last Revised: July 18, 2005