Hela Laadhari
constant contact with literary works. Just as there is no act
Objective of this paper: Presenting some of the main
ideas of reception theory by Hans Robert Jauss.
Hans Robert Jauss belongs to the German Constance School
(sometimes written Konstance), the same school that
Wolfgang Iser belongs to. Therefore a distinction should be
made between the two seemingly close but in fact different
approaches:
A theory of aesthetic response is confronted with the
problem of how a hitherto unformulated situation can be
processed and, indeed, understood. A theory of
reception always deals with existing readers, whose
reactions testify to certain historically conditioned
experience of literature. A theory of response has its
roots in the text; a theory of reception arises from a
history of readers judgment. (The Act of Reading x)
Jauss sees that the rank of literary works resides mainly from
the criteria of influence, reception, and posthumous fame...
(Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 5). His main focus is on
the interpretations of the text by real readers but he does not
lose sight of the primary aesthetic experience the text can
provide. He defines primary aesthetic experience in relation
to pleasure: Aesthetic experience occurs before there is
cognition and interpretation of the significance of a work,
and certainly before all reconstruction of an authors intent.
The primary experience of a work of art takes place in the
orientation of its effect, in an understanding that is pleasure,
and a pleasure that is cognitive. (Aesthetic experience and
Literary Hermeneutics, xxix).
Jauss develops his theory on the bases of Marxism and
Formalism. For Jauss, both schools have in common the
turning away from positivisms blind empiricism and
literature... once again be productively conceived as an
evidence of the social process, or a moment of literary
evolution (19). He attempts at bridg[ing] the gap between
literature and history, between historical and aesthetic
approaches, begin[ning] at the point at which both schools
stop (18). He wants to overcome the limitations of both
schools as they deprive literature of a dimension that
inalienably belongs to its social function: the dimension of its
reception and influence... (19). The reader is abused in both
schools: on the one hand Orthodox Marxist aesthetics treat
the reader- if at all- no different from the author and on the
other hand, Formalist school needs the reader only as a
perceiving subject (18).
In order to study the reception of the work one needs to
reconstruct its horizon of expectations through the detection
of the following elements: First through the familiar norms
or the immanent poetics of the genre, second, through the
implicit relationships to familiar works of literary- historical
surroundings; and third, through the opposition between
fiction and reality, between the poetic and the practical
functions of language (24). The first element is related to the
expected norms of the genre the reader acquires through
of verbal communication that is not related to a general,
socially or situationally conditioned norm or convention,
says Jauss, It is also unimaginable that a literary work set
itself into an informational vacuum, without indicating a
specific situation of understanding in other words, without a
relation to a genre or a norm (79). The second emanates from
the fact that the reader is already influenced by other works
whether they preceded the work or appeared with it in the
same period. The third factor is related to the fact that the
reader receives the work within the narrow horizon of literary
experience-the fact that literary language is different from
ordinary language and serves different functions.
The horizon of expectations will help uncover the factors that
govern the readers interpretation of any text. It determines
the aesthetic distance as Jauss defines it: The disparity
between a given horizon of expectations and the appearance
of new work (25). A work of art may fulfill, change or alter
a given horizon of expectations. The distance will mark the
value of the work. The initial rejection will change the
horizon gradually and the violation becomes self-evident and
expected resulting in the works canonisation. The work will
reach a state in which it becomes entertaining or culinary
when it fulfills the newly changed horizon. The changed
horizon will form the new expectations against which other
future works are received.
Reception includes the task of merging of horizons: the
horizon of the present is fused with the original (or historical)
horizon in which the work is produced and initially received.
The reconstruction of the horizon of expectations would
allow one to pose the question to which the work is an
answer (28). Jauss sees the work as an answer and the
reader will understand it if s/he constructs the question the
work is an answer to. When a reader decides to respond to
the work by becoming productive, by re-writing the work
(such as in adaptations), it means that the answer the work
provided is no longer satisfactory.
Bibliography:
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary
Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Print.
---. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Tran. Timothy Bathi.
Ed. Paul de Man. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
Print.
---, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding.
Ed & Tran. Michael Hays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1989. Print.