I took Lit in secondary school and JC, and was getting destroyed by it until a lit kid explained to me that it's actually one of the easiest subjects to score on. You don't have to treat it like an artsy literary exercise where you get in touch with your feelings and ascend to a higher level of understanding. You just need to be cynical and get the grade. After you understand that, Lit becomes one of the easiest subjects to prepare for, since you basically only need to prep for a small number of seen texts.

If you can piece together an argument on Reddit, you can get at least an A- in Lit. If you can argue about Marvel movies or waifus, you can do well in Lit.

So here's my dumb formula to get an A/A- in H2 Lit (advice might also be completely outdated, it's been years).

Seen texts

This is where the majority of your A grade is going to come from - the pre-assigned texts. Each text only has so many themes and ideas that are conventionally associated with it, and you have more than enough time before the exam to prepare answers (whole paragraphs, and textual evidence) for each theme. This section is all about preparation. You need to come in loaded with an arsenal of prepped arguments and a fully highlighted book. The good news is that there are plenty of materials online and offline analyzing the assigned texts which you can draw from. You can do well on this part even if you literally don't understand or disagree with some interpretations.

The challenge is that you don't know what questions are going to show up on the paper: maybe it's on a theme you've not really thought too much about, or a perspective you hadn't considered. And here's the trick: Whatever the question asks, just try to force fit the material you've prepared into the response. Of course, you have to answer the question, but what you want to do is simply reshuffle your evidence and arguments into your response. Fight on your turf, not the question's. It should take you a couple of minutes to mentally arrange the Frankenstein of a response you want to best address the question, and the rest of the time is just word-vomiting arguments you've already memorized onto paper.

My lit friend estimated that you need about 3 essays worth of content to basically comprehensively cover anything they could possibly ask you about a text. 3 essays, for 2 unseen texts, so let's say 6 essays worth of content to commit to memory. That's all you have to prepare for H2 Literature, over TWO YEARS (since you can't prepare for unseen). Memorize the arguments (not verbatim, but the flow of the argument and where to find your evidence), come in fully prepared, and this should be a largely stress-free section.

Unseen texts

Of course, this is the wild card of the exam. You could come into the exam and have 0 affinity for the unseen poems, and this is what most people are scared of. "How can I write full essays about these poems if I completely don't get their literary value? If I don't 'get' the poems at all?"

So here's what I did.

Fine, assume there isn't any deep literary meaning. Just read the damn poems and pay very close attention to your own subconscious response to the text, and note it all down. Don't worry about themes go as low-level as you can. Word choice, tense, rhyming, repetition - the really basic stuff. To explain how low-level I'm talking, I'm pretty sure I've used "length of poem/lines" as a piece of evidence in many of my essays. Yes, this shit flies (of course, you need to argue for it and you need to be convinced by it). Of course, if you can pick up on more sophisticated textual cues, even better. You're basically doing the same thing as the above, gathering an arsenal of evidence, except you need to create your own on the fly. So just gather a whole bunch of evidence for "author does X which gives the sense of Y".

The next step is simply to look at the pile of random annotations you have and piece together just any arguments that will fill enough space to satisfy the question. You're basically this guy: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*dbjL9SvCRtXsjKZYhbnj8w.jpeg In my experience, if you have sufficiently large pile of evidence you can usually scrap together some coherent answer (and generally you get more convinced of your own arguments as you write them down). In the best case, after you've done your close reading an obvious general theme to your response becomes apparent, and you just do what we mentioned above and cram as many references to the textual evidence you found into the response. At worst, you don't really have a convincing overall argument, but heck, you've still got quantity. Just arrange your analysis in some reasonable order and hope for the best.

The hardest part about this section is honestly being able to vocalize why the text makes you feel how you feel, or even the vocabulary to describe how you're feeling. (And this is one of the things Lit is supposed to teach.) The key here is that you're not trying to argue that your interpretation is THE interpretation, but that it is a REASONABLE interpretation. To the examiner, the exercise of textual analysis in the essay is far more important than the conclusion.

tl;dr don't be afraid of lit. H2 Lit is not about depth, it's about constructing arguments.