Reading the Work and What Is Being Read Within It
From Barbara Jones Guetti’s “Resisting the Aesthetic” in Donald Keesey’s Contexts for Criticism, page 386.
“Virtually no critics have thought of reading the questions Keats addresses to the urn literally—that is, not as rhetorical exclamations, but as sincere and urgent demands for information—and therefore it has not occurred to anyone that Keats is, as de Man would put it, attempting to read, rather than to imagine, the urn.”
I really liked Guetti’s article because of her forward and somewhat sarcastic style (at least it seemed that way to me) and because of her critical approach to Keats’s poem. Although I do not think her idea is as innovative as she claims (I remember a few classmates discussing this idea on their blogs and in class when we first read Keats’s poem), it is definitely interesting. She suggests that we not only should be reading the work itself, but also what is being considered by the author or characters within the work.
This idea reminded me of the Writing of Fiction class that I took. We often talked about how every detail in a work is significant and should be put there for a reason that relates to the rest of the story because each reader may interpret the work differently based on various details. Guetti brings up this idea in that she suggests that when she read the poem, she saw literal, not rhetorical, questions. This very simple detail (a question mark) makes all the difference. We learned that some books punctuate these last few lines differently, which could change the entire meaning of the poem, as suggested in other formalist articles we read.
However, Guetti goes further to explain that the literal treatment of these questions allows the poststructuralist to see that, “The words in the poem ‘tease’ us” (389). New questions in the poem create more unanswerable questions until, like most poststructuralist essays I have read, we are left with more questions than answers.
Yet from this questionable essay, I have been able to understand de Man’s essay a bit better, especially the ideas of rhetoric and grammar: how these are the same, how they are different, and how the poststructuralist can use these ideas against one another to deconstruct a text.
I agree that I don't think Guetti's idea is as innovative as she presumes, but it was a helpful look at a different possible meaning to the 'urn.' And it definitly helped in the understanding of de Man's rhetoric and grammar essay.