Close Reading by John Barrels

In the beginning, John Barrell explains what makes English literature be academically called a discipline. For such reason, it is called so because it requires the English students to reach the specific skills in order to grasp the meaning of a text in literary work. These specific skills involve its own rules which should consist of the skill of close critical reading. In addition, the emphasis of close reading is concerned on how a text of a literary work has a meaning. However, a literary text, according to the advocate of practical criticism, does not merely lay on any kind of argument it develops because it is much concerned to bring an experience, actual or fictional, feeling, perception, and reflection.

As what John explains, the competent close readers will concern to show that the question of what and how are inseparable and cannot be separated each other. Therefore, the reader should be able to describe and to evaluate the literary work. In short, the close critical reading should not be ignorantly concerned to understand literary work in relation to the specific historical moment of its production and the meaning of a text does not depend to any important extent on anything external to it. However, if the text fails to embody its content fully in its form, the representation is that inadequate to the reality. John points out what properly literary text is based in part of the claim that the former aim at the resolution of conflicting constructions of experience, or, where that is impossible is irresoluble at the balance of opposing constructions. In conclusion, as what it is mentioned previously, that the competent readers are those who recognize that their political affiliations and their shifting political situations as defined in particular by class and gender, are somehow contingent to their identity as readers.