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also discussed by Jauss. A literary work has its reception not just at the moment of its original appearance, when it acts on the horizon of expectation of its first audience (or 'solves' their 'problems'), but also at later periods of time, when it can still (or again) influence the historical process; or to put it from another perspective: a new literary work reacts not only to the reception of the immediately preceding work, but also to the reception of such older works as still affect literary consciousness. So it seems that the work reception work model needs to be supplemented by an account of later receptions, which would however destroy the simplicity and practicability of the model. If one wishes to put Jauss's suggestions into practice, one obviously needs to renounce the lofty ambition of describing 'the historical succession of literary works' and satisfy oneself with studying the connections among a few works only. |
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One possibility is to write the history of a genre. A genre is a historical series of works, but if we wish to describe how and why each work in the series differs from its predecessors, we cannot be content with just comparing the works, but need to take account of the receptions of these works. At each point in the series, the reception of the works thus far has created an expectation as to what a work in the genre should be like; a new work, if it is to be accepted as belonging to the genre, must conform to these expectations. But if this new work makes a contribution of its own (as will happen), its reception will modify the generic expectation, causing a revision of the reception of the earlier works. This new situation will then again be changed by a following work, etc.22 A history of a genre along these lines is feasible if the genre is more or less clearly circumscribed and does not contain too many works, as is the case with most genres of ancient literature. With genres such as tragedy or the (modern) novel, however, it is difficult to imagine how a Jaussian history could be written. |
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Jauss's own practical work has mainly consisted in studies of the connection between two works only, in which he has tried to show that the second work provided an answer to questions posed by the first. From the pairs chosen by Jauss it is again apparent that literary history cannot limit itself to the chronological succession of works: the pairs not only belong to different periods, but even to different languages (Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse and Goethe's Werther, Goethe's and Valéry's Faust, etc.).23 This type of research is of course also familiar from studies on the Nachleben of |
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22 Jauss has given his views on genre in ''Theorie der Gattungen und Literatur des Mittelalters", first published in 1972 and reprinted in Jauss (1977b); for a fuller exposition and an application to ancient bucolic see Nauta (1990). |
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23 These studies have been incorporated in Jauss (1982); see 50533 for Valéry and Goethe, 585653 for Goethe and Rousseau; also 53484 on the dramas about Amphitryo by Plautus, Molière and Kleist (a series of three works this time) and 70452 on the dramas about Iphigeneia by Goethe and Racine. |
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