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the classics; its subject is sometimes known as 'productive reception'.24 Jauss distinguishes himself by his emphasis on question and answer, but it should be noted that in these studies he no longer speaks of the 'historical logic', but of the 'hermeneutics' of question and answer: his primary aim has shifted from history to interpretation. He wants to understand a work by studying how it reacts to an earlier work. |
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One further step is to abandon diachrony altogether and to concentrate on the synchronic interaction between an individual work and the horizon of expectation of its original audience. This entails falling back into the historicism which reception aesthetics set out to overcome, but nevertheless the focus on the audience has a few advantages over the old historicism.25 First, the object of study is now the communication between author, work and audience, not merely the production of the work by its author. Second, this attention to communication leads to a consideration of the functions of the work for its audience: did the work affirm or deny existing norms, did it strengthen or undermine group solidarity, did it offer entertainment or did it provoke thought or even action? such questions can indeed offer a meaningful perspective on the relation between literature and (general) history.26 Finally, practitioners of this kind of research are more hermeneutically aware, because they no longer pretend to offer 'the' interpretation of the past work, but only a reconstruction of the meaning the work had for its original audience. Such a hermeneutical position does not, however, question that it is possible to give an objective description of the work as well of the horizon of expectation of the original audience: otherwise, how could one describe the interaction of the two? Indeed, Jauss himself argues at length that the horizon of expectation is objektivierbar (17377). Yet elsewhere in his lecture he seems to deny with equal emphasis that objective historical knowledge is possible. At this point (if not earlier) we become aware that there is a third gravitational centre in Jauss's text besides aesthetics and history: hermeneutics. |
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Jauss develops his hermeneutics not so much in the context of the work reception work model as in the context of another model, which one might call the work reception reception model: a work of the past is connected with the present not only by 'the historical succession of literary works' (169), but also by 'the chain of receptions' (170) of the work itself; in this chain our own reception is the latest (but not the last) link. According |
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24 See e.g. Barner (1973). |
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25 What I here call (by implication) a 'new historicism' is something different from the American 'New Historicism' (cf. e.g. Veeser 1989); but there are, I think, possibilities of contact. |
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26 This approach is sometimes known as Funktionsgeschichte; within classical philology, it has been especially successful in the study of archaic Greek lyric: see e.g. Rösier (1980) and (1984), where the term is discussed at 188 with n. 33. On Horace there is Mauch (1986). For further discussion and application to Latin literature, see Nauta (1987) and (1994). |
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