Abstract
John Keats, a main figure in the second generation of Romantic poets, was not generally well received by his contemporary critics, though during the course of time, he has become one of the most beloved poets. Stuart Hall proposes an analytical model of communication, namely the encoding/decoding model, which assumes a complex structure of relations to be produced and sustained through linked but distinctive moments which are termed as production, circulation, distribution/ consumption, and reproduction. This paper employs Hall’s encoding/decoding communication model as a yardstick to move beyond his approach, which mainly addresses modern mass media and communication system, and relate the distinctive moments playing integrally in encoding and decoding to Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819). Furthermore, there is an attempt to turn the spotlight on the ode’s durability after the French Revolution passions abate and the poem starts to gain its thingness.
Highlights
Stuart Hall (1932- 2014) the Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies
A favorite social site to be profoundly analyzed was mass media communication taken into fuller account through his encoding/decoding model of communication which, like textual analysis, focuses on the scope of negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience
Not a merely verbose object does portray human interiority more accurately than an object having retained its thingness. Keats represents his own interior through the urn‟s depicted scenes and once the urn as an object gains its thingness, it encodes the message lying somehow within the human interiority: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (4650)
Summary
Stuart Hall (1932- 2014) the Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies. It could assist us to take a moderately novel look at a historical communication medium, being a poem, and look into its good or poor reception in the era wherein it was composed With this task being accomplished, we will mark the poem‟s durability long after its first appearance, while taking note of the Thing Theory and Thingness proposed by modern thinkers, the key figures of which should include Bill Brown, Jane Bennett and Daniel Miller. Upon pursuing the call of things, a number of leading concepts comes in handy to carry out this comparatively analytical study integrating Stuart Hall‟s groundbreaking communication model with the propositions brought up in thing theory studies These concepts should include “the thingness of objects”
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