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text says is the same as understanding what it says to me. We have seen that Jauss, in spite of his assertions to the contrary, does not integrate application in this way, so that for him the 'setting off of horizons' is no longer a necessary preliminary to understanding, but is in itself a way of understanding; the object of this understanding is the historical meaning of the text, separated from its application to the present. Yet Jauss's views on reception forbid him to identify this historical meaning with 'the' meaning of the text; he notes that one would 'fall back into historicism' if one could not turn the question "what did the text say?" into the question "what does the text say to me and what do I say to the text?" (822). The formulation is almost the same as the one quoted above from the Provokation, where, due to the fusion of horizons, the two questions 'passed into' (übergehen in) each other in the sense of becoming identical; here, where the 'setting off of horizons' keeps the questions distinct, one cannot quite see what 'turn into' (überführen in) could mean. Again, the problem seems to be that Jauss wishes to remain faithful to a Gadamerian hermeneutics while at the same time straining away from it. |
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If we ask what the "Spleen" article can contribute to philology, we come to the same conclusions, I think, as we reached earlier about the Provokation. Jauss's ideas about the horizon of expectation of the original audience and of later audiences usefully encourage consideration of the communication process as a whole, including function, and do not lack the hermeneutical self-awareness which nowadays one is entitled to demand of any approach. But a specifically Jaussian hermeneutics does not exist. Jauss tried to find a form of understanding that would be 'historical' without being 'historicist', but failed, because he did not reconcile the Gadamerian and the historicist elements in his position. Yet it is precisely his promise of offering the best of both worlds that has allured his readers. |
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In 1992 Lowell Edmunds published his book From a Sabine Jar,38 in which 'Jauss's method is applied in an experimental spirit to the reading of an ode of Horace' (x); however, Edmunds deviates from Jauss in several significant ways, of which I will discuss only two: his handling of historical evidence and his exclusion of the history of scholarship from the third reading. The ode chosen by Edmunds is 1.9, often dubbed 'the Soracte Ode', after the mountain mentioned in the second line:39 |
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38 Edmunds (1992); parenthetical page-references in my main text will henceforth refer to this work. |
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39 Since Edmunds polemicizes against this 'title' (see 6574), I emphasize that I use it only as a conventional designation, without prejudicing my interpretation of the ode. |
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