CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature study guide
CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature exam is a credit-by-examination test covering material usually taught in a general undergraduate literature course. It is aimed at students who have read widely and perceptively in poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction and who want to demonstrate college-level literary competence without enrolling in the course. No familiarity with specific works is required: every question is based on passages supplied in the test, selected so that no prior experience with them is needed, drawn primarily from American and British literature. Questions emphasize comprehension, interpretation, and analysis - responding to nuances of meaning, tone, imagery, and style; interpreting metaphor; recognizing rhetorical and stylistic devices; and grasping a speaker's or author's attitudes. The CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature study guide has 3 sections and about 1,063 words.
01Poetry: Reading for Sense, Sound, and Structure
Poetry items test whether you can paraphrase a poem's plain sense, identify the speaker (not the poet), and explain how form and figurative language produce meaning. Know these concepts: speaker and occasion (who is talking, to whom, in what situation); diction and connotation (why this word, not a synonym); imagery (sensory detail, not merely decoration); figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, symbol); tone (the speaker's attitude, inferred from word choice); and sound and structure (meter, rhyme, stanza breaks, enjambment, refrain, line-end emphasis).
365 words, about 2 min02Prose: Fiction and Nonfiction-Narrative, Argument, and Style
Prose passages on this exam are excerpts from stories, novels, essays, and speeches. Questions probe point of view (first person, third limited, third omniscient, unreliable narrator), characterization (direct vs.
345 words, about 2 min03Drama: Dialogue, Conflict, and Staging on the Page
Drama excerpts test your ability to read a script as performance. Understand dramatic structure (exposition, rising action, climax, resolution), conflict (internal and interpersonal), character revealed through dialogue and stage directions , dramatic irony (audience knows what a character does not), soliloquy and aside (private speech the audience overhears), subtext (what is meant beneath what is said), and setting and stagecraft as conveyed in stage directions.
353 words, about 2 min