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study the past from the perspective of the present, and positivism, which treated the literary work as a 'fact' to be 'explained' from its sources or from the biography of its author. As a reaction against positivism, Geistesgeschichte and Traditionsforschung had reinstated consideration of literature as art, but at the cost of neglecting its ties with the real world.16 More promising than these traditional approaches are Marxism and Russian Formalism, which both have the advantage that they see the literary work as part of a historical process which is still continuing, so that past and present are connected. But Marxism views the history of literature as a mere 'reflection' of socio-economic history,17 whereas Russian Formalism regards the two as completely independent. So Marxism fails to account for the aesthetic character of literature, Formalism for its historical character. How can we account for both? |
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Jauss's answer is: by devising a Rezeptionsästhetik, a theory of art which enables us to deal with the reception of literature by its audience. Traditional literary scholarship had focused either on the author or on the representation of reality or on the work itself, but had systematically ignored the audience. Yet it is the audience which decides on the aesthetic character of the work as well as on its place in history. In order to explain why this is so, Jauss introduces a term which has become as notorious as Rezeptionsästhetik itself: Erwartungshorizont, anglicized as 'horizon of expectation(s)'. |
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Unfortunately, Jauss is not very precise in his use of this term. One of the problems is that he seems to use it both with the subjective and with the objective genitive. Thus, when he speaks of 'the horizon of expectation of the audience' (182), the genitive is clearly subjective, but in 'the horizon of expectation of a text' (175), 'of a work' (177), or 'of literature' (202), the genitive is apparently objective. Yet it is not as clear-cut as that, because Jauss also speaks of 'the horizon of expectation . . . which the author assumes in his audience' (177), adducing as examples works which evoke 'the horizon of expectation of their readers' (176) in order then to 'destroy' this horizon and go off in unexpected directions; in such cases the work has an expectation of the expectation of its audience, and this 'expected expectation' can only be known by interpreting the work itself.18 If the work is not that explicit, Jauss suggests that we can determine the 'horizon of expectation' by looking at three factors: the norms of the genre to which the work belongs, the forms and themes of related works, and the opposition between |
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16 In this context Jauss is particularly severe on Curtius (1948): see Jauss (1970) 15354; similarly Jauss (1982) 68788. |
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17 It must be noted that Marxists have accused Jauss of simplifying their positions: see the summary of the discussion in Holub (1984) 12134. |
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18 Jauss had in fact first employed the notion of 'horizon of expectation' in his interpretation of the Old French Roman de Renart; see his own comments in Jauss (1970) 184, 20002 and (1982) 69094. |
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