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Is that readership the first (for the classicist, the ancient) audience, the implied reader, the competent or ideal reader, a postulated super-reader, or a circle of like-minded readers? Attempts by classicists to reconstruct the audiences of an Augustan literary event or an ancient novel or the Neronian court circle merely scratch the surface of the problem.27 |
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Although the Nachleben of classical writings has long been of interest to philologists, from this more modern perspective the notion of a objective, immutable, and recoverable text, along with the historical consciousness implicit in it, has to be abandoned in favour of the assumption of "an horizon of expectation" entertained by the original audience and constituted by expectations of genre, models and tradition, as well as the social and historical ambience. Any new work that transcends this horizon then sets up a new horizon in turn, as the work's reception and influence demands a more thoughtful reading. The aesthetic distance created between this and the expectations of the original audience will disappear for a later audience with its now revised horizon of expectation. Our own understanding and evaluation of a literary work will derive from the constantly changing aesthetic resonances of the work among later audiences until it is brought into contemporary existence, creating once again its own receptive audience. There is a continuing dialogical and incremental relationship: all interpretations contribute to the unfolding of the immanent significance of the work. Reception is the starting point of evaluation, as well as of the assessment of canon formation. |
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This approach involves many difficulties. It has however analogies, as was mentioned earlier, in the views held by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot about the interrelation of tradition and the individual talent and the importance of the classics in translation. Eliot had claimed that each new work of art altered the arrangement of all previous works of art in the musée imaginaire of European literature. Pound's interest in "creative" translation, such as Elizabethan adaptations of Seneca, Pope's Iliad, and indeed his own Homage to Sextus Propertius, would lead to his tendentious claim: "The Classics only exist in translation!" Both were arguing against the objective self-subsistency of the particular work: the classics are only valuable, indeed viable, in so far as they are transmissible as living works to later generations and continue to influence later literature and other forms of artistic expression (drama, opera, ballet, and now cinema). These indeed may be regarded as the most significant forms of Textrezeptionsgeschichte, and they are much more easily documented than the putative reactions of the general or special reading public in any given era, since these may in any case be skewed by contemporary censorship and various religious, educational and |
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27 Iser (1978) worked with the concept of "an implied reader"; Fish (1980) postulated "the competent reader" and "the cultured audience". For investigations of into the relationship between classical authors and their audience, see now Woodman and Powell (1993). |
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