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critics', as long as one realizes that this is even more of a mixed bag than 'reception theory'.12 |
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Separating Iser from Jauss brings up the question which of the two to select for discussion. Iser's work has the advantage of providing something of a method for studying concrete texts: one tries to describe how the text structures the experience of the reader as s/he goes along; examples of this kind of analysis in classical philology are already available.13 In the case of Jauss, however, it is much less clear whether he offers a method, and if so, for what. But quite recently two American classicists independently (and in different ways) have held up the same text of Jauss as a model to be followed in the interpretation of Roman poetry.14 Because this text is (I think) highly problematical and moreover not representative of Jauss's work as a whole, I felt that it might serve a useful purpose if I attempted an exposition of the 'aesthetics of reception' rather than discussing the more familiar 'reader-response criticism'. |
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Jauss's main concern in his epoch-making lecture of 1967 is immediately apparent from its title, or rather from both of its titles: it was delivered as Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Literaturgeschichte? (with a glance at Schiller) and published as Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft.15 At first sight paradoxically, Jauss proposed to renew literary scholarship not by having recourse to modern methods such as those of structuralism (then very much en vogue), but by returning to the old and obsolescent discipline of literary history. Jauss's reason for this move was his belief that literary history is called upon to account for three fundamental truths about literary works: that they are not timeless entities, but historical events; that they are not mere objects, but works of art; and that some works of the past are still part of our present experience of literature. Current literary history, Jauss argued, was unsatisfactory in these respects, because it was still under the spell of the two dominating tendencies of nineteenth-century scholarship: historicism, which refused to |
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12 See Tompkins (1980), Suleiman and Crosman (1980) and Freund (1987). In all of these Iser (but not Jauss) is prominently present. |
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13 See e.g. Pedrick and Rabinowitz (1986) and Slater (1990). |
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14 Galinsky (1992) 811, Edmunds (1992). Galinsky refers to an earlier partial publication (in Fuhrmann, Jauss and Pannenberg (eds.) (1981) 47381; cf. 472), Edmunds to an English translation of "Der poetische Text im Horizontwandel der Lektüre (Baudelaires Gedicht: 'Spleen II')" in Jauss (1982) 81365. |
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15 Schiller's famous inaugural lecture at Jena in 1789 was called Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?; on the sense of the allusion cf. Holub (1984) 5354. I will quote Jauss's lecture from its final version in Jauss (1970) 144207; parenthetical numbers in my main text will refer to this publication. |
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