The Gentle Giant

Guetti Gets Down to Business

Guetti, ''Resisting the Aesthetic'' -- Jerz EL312 (Literary Criticism)

"The questions he (Keats) starts to ask are not so much about what's on the urn, as about what's missing from it: what has been omitted, what must be sacrificed if we are to remain obedient to his previous instructions" (Guetti 389).

Guetti really impressed me, because she takes a different approach to John Keats's poem. Instead of taking the approach of trying to say what the urn is about, Guetti takes the approach of how to actually read the urn and ask really important, although broad, questions. I was more than impressed with the questions Guetti was asking, because those are deep philosophical questions that we could ask. The only problem is that we really are not provided with answers, but according to Dr. Jerz, "that's a good thing." In the statement above, primarily concerning staying obedient, I think that the person reading it becomes actually more disobedient toward those instructions, mainly because it causes that person to complete stray away from the conventional questions that are normally asked about the meaning of the words on the urn. Another thing is that Guetti makes the assumption that we once could know the answer on the Urn, but in all actuality, we never really knew the answers; we only made evaluative speculations based off of what we can interpret from the poem and the Urn. Some interesting points to note, but I would like to actually hear your thoughts on Guetti.