|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Historicizing Reading:
The Aesthetics of Reception and Horace's 'Soracte Ode'1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the valedictory lecture which Hans Robert Jauss delivered in 1987 at the University of Constance, he proclaimed that reception theory, which he had launched in his inaugural lecture in 1967, had met with such success that 'in retrospect it becomes incomprehensible that its problems have ever been problems at all'; a few moments later, he went as far as to speak of a 'paradigm shift'.2 Even if it can be doubted whether Jauss was correct in applying Thomas S. Kuhn's account of the history of science to the history of literary studies,3 there can be no doubt that reception theory is firmly established, at least in Germany, and that research on reception has become a routine activity of literary scholarship. One sign of the wide diffusion of reception theory is the abundance of introductions, surveys, anthologies, bibliographies and special issues of journals and there are even protreptic articles addressed to classicists.4 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What gives one pause, however, is a closer look at the publications I have just referred to. The German titles I listed in my note all date back to the 1970s, while the English titles, even though they are from the 1980s, do not report any newer developments. One gets the impression that reception theory came to a standstill more than a decade ago. This impression is confirmed when one considers the intellectual biographies of its two major |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
1 This is a considerably revised and expanded version of an article published in Dutch as Nauta (1991). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 The inaugural lecture was published in its definitive version as "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft" in Jauss (1970) 144207. The valedictory lecture was published, together with a useful bibliography of Jauss's writings, as Jauss (1987); the quotations are from p. 5. Here as elsewhere the translations are my own. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 Cf. Kuhn (1970). Already in the very first phase of the elaboration of reception theory, Jauss had announced a 'paradigm shift': Jauss (1969); later, he put the term in the title of a review of his own work: Jauss (1983). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 Among all this material a few items stand out. Warning 1975 collects major theoretical contributions, Link (1976) pursues systematic and didactic aims, whereas Grimm (1977) offers theory, applications and seventy pages of bibliography; in English Holub (1984) may be recommended as an accessible, well-balanced and dispassionate introduction, with a good annotated bibliography. Opportunities for classical philology are discussed by Barner (1977) and P.L. Schmidt (1985). |
|
|
|
|
|