Reception Theory

Robert C. Holub

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136496202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 2002. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. Reception theory is a term that is likely to sound strange to speakers of English who have not encountered it previously. In the largest sense it is a reaction to social, intellectual, and literary developments in West Germany during the late 1960s.

1

The change in paradigm
and its socio-historical
function

Paradigms in the history of criticism

In an essay of 1969 entitled “The change in the paradigm of literary scholarship,”¹ Hans Robert Jauss sketched the history of literary methods and postulated that the beginnings of a “revolution” in contemporary literary studies were at hand. Borrowing the concepts of “paradigm” and “scientific revolution” from the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, Jauss presents literary investigation as an analogous undertaking to procedures in the natural sciences. The study of literature, he contends, is not a process involving the gradual accumulation of facts and evidence bringing each successive generation closer to knowledge of what literature actually is or to a correct understanding of individual literary works. Rather, the development is characterized by qualitative jumps, discontinuities, and original points of departure. A paradigm that once guided literary investigation is discarded when it no longer satisfies the requirements posed for it by literary studies. A new paradigm, more suitable for this task and independent of the older model, replaces the obsolete approach until it, in turn, proves unable to cope with its function of explaining past works of literature for the present. Each paradigm defines not only the accepted methodological procedures with which critics approach literature – the “normal” literary scholarship within the academic community – but also the accepted literary canon. In other words, a given paradigm creates both the techniques for interpretation and the objects to be interpreted.

To bolster his thesis, Jauss presents a scheme in which he discusses the sequence of three previous paradigms and what he sees as the emerging paradigm in literary studies. Following a “pre-scientific” phase of literary scholarship, Jauss notes the emergence of a “classical-humanist” paradigm. This norm for literary studies involved a procedure whereby works were compared with the approved models of the ancients. Those works that successfully imitated the classics were judged good or acceptable; those that broke with the conventions of the time-honored models were bad or unsatisfactory. The task of the literary critic was to measure the works of the present against fixed rules and thus to determine whether or not they satisfied established poetic practices.

The breakdown of this paradigm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a part of the “scientific revolution” of historicism, which arose in the wake of the establishment of nation-states and the strivings for national unity throughout Europe. As a result of political changes and ideological necessities, literary history became an idealized moment of national legitimation. Consequently, activity centered on source studies, attempts to reconstruct the prehistory of standard medieval texts, and the editing of critical editions in the national tradition. The generally accepted positivistic approach of this paradigm produced the celebrated national histories of literature associated with Gervinus, Scherer, De Sanctis, and Lanson. Methodologically, this “historicist-positivist” approach is often identified with a mechanical approach to literary texts and a narrow, almost chauvinist outlook. Remnants of this paradigm exist today, Jauss notes, and he cites official government examination questions as well as the bulk of Marxist scholarship as evidence for the perseverance of this perspective. By the First World War, though, it had outlived its usefulness for productive literary research.

Out of the “growing discontent with the positivist asceticism” emerges a third paradigm, which Jauss labels “aesthetic-formalist.” Associated with it are such diverse methods as the stylistic studies of Leo Spitzer and the Geistesgeschichte (roughly, “history of ideas”) of Oskar Walzel, as well as Russian Formalism and New Criticism. What connects these various critics and schools is a turn from historical and causal explanations to a concentration on the work itself. The precise description of linguistic technique, literary devices, composition, and structure provided scholars of this paradigm with an array of interpretive tools for analysis. At the same time this approach legitimized a preoccupation with literature as such by raising the literary work to the status of a self-sufficient object for research.

The new paradigm

But since the end of the Second World War Jauss also detects signs of the exhaustion of this paradigm. The rehabilitation of philosophical hermeneutics, the call for criticism with more social relevance, and the appearance of alternatives like the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye or structuralism are for him symptoms of a crisis in the third paradigm. At present, however, there are no exact indications of the precise composition of the new direction. Although structuralism – and presumably Jauss includes here varieties of “post-structuralism” as well – may appear to be a likely candidate for the new scholarly model, Jauss believes that its origins as an opposition to the older philological-historical school of thought and the diversity of critical directions that it has taken exclude it from consideration for the moment. Its primary value thus far has been its challenge to literary scholarship to incorporate categories and procedures developed by linguistics into the analysis of literary works.

Although the methodological orientation of the fourth paradigm cannot yet be determined with precision, Jauss does outline the demands that it will have to fulfill. First and foremost is the requirement that every previous paradigm has also satisfied: the interpretation, mediation, and actualization of past art:

This specific accomplishment [of a literary paradigm] … is the ability to wrest works of art from the past by means of new interpretations, to translate them into a new present, to make the experiences preserved in past art accessible again; or, in other words, to ask the questions that are posed anew by every generation and to which the art of the past is able to speak and again to give us answers, (pp. 54–5)

Moreover, any new paradigm is faced with an additional challenge in contemporary society. For the increasing importance of the mass media compels any prospective paradigm to incorporate methods for dealing adequately with an entire range of hitherto unforeseen “aesthetic and quasi-aesthetic” effects. With these factors in mind, Jauss outlines three specific methodological exigencies for a fourth paradigm:

1 The mediation of aesthetic/formal and historical/ reception-related analysis, as well as art, history, and social reality;

2 The linking of structural and hermeneutical methods (which hardly take note of their respective procedures and results);

3 The probing of an aesthetics (no longer related solely to description) of effect [Wirkung] and a new rhetoric, which can equally well account for “high-class” literature as well as popular literature and phenomena of the mass media, (p. 56)

Tentative steps towards the realization of such a paradigm are not entirely lacking. They can be found, Jauss claims, in the reforms initiated by the department of literature at the University of Constance, where both Jauss and Wolfgang Iser hold positions.

In this essay Jauss never mentions reception theory by name. Clearly, however, it is his favored candidate for the fourth paradigm. The two main competing theories for paradigmatic status, Marxism and structuralism, both of which made significant inroads into German academia during the late 1960s, are disqualified on rather dubious grounds. Marxism is dismissed since it is considered to consist only of mechanistic procedures; it can thus be conveniently consigned to the historicist-positivist dustbin. Structuralism, although granted a degree of legitimacy, is in the last analysis discredited because it has not exhibited the unity required for paradigmatic status. Only reception theory seems able to fulfill the three demands that Jauss postulates. And although it is never explicitly stated, the attentive reader will no doubt draw this conclusion as well.

Scientific revolutions and literary scholarship

The appropriation of Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions¹ for a history of literary scholarship also seems to be a device for enhancing the attraction of reception theory. By defining scholarly endeavor as a discontinuous enterprise, Jauss is better able to emphasize the novelty of his own efforts. Continuity with earlier attempts to elucidate the nature of aesthetic response is thereby effectively severed, and the programmatically innovative aspect of reception theory is secured. Moreover, this appropriation of the concept of a scientific revolution, in the tumultuous climate of the late 1960s at German universities, had a built-in appeal to students and younger scholars. By adopting Jauss's position on reception, they found themselves in “opposition” to the establishment and were also assured of the pioneering status of their work.

It should be noted, however, that Jauss has been forced to evade several important problems inherent in transferring Kuhn's theory. Kuhn, for example, postulates the “scientific community” as a special type of social grouping relatively independent of other organizations. He also feels that there are long periods of “normal” science, when scientists do more or less routine investigations according to established practices. During these periods there is a relative scarcity of competing paradigms. A single paradigm dominates, and it is validated and almost universally accepted by the scientific community.

Clearly these notions have limited application in literary scholarship. Literary communities – if we deign to extend this term to the literary sphere – are more often embroiled in “paradigm” controversies of a more complex nature. The continuity in Marxist criticism or in structuralist thought, the current penchant for neo-positivist methods in some European circles, or the perseverance of New Critical premises in many American universities all suggest that it is difficult to speak of a period of “normal” scholarship. No physicist would be taken seriously if he/she advocated a return to Newton. But literary scholars are still given a fair hearing when they propose phenomenological or immanent methods as the most adequate ways of interpreting texts. Looking at footnotes in scholarly works, according to Kuhn a sign of an accepted paradigm, one would be tempted to conclude that in the field of cultural studies we must speak of quasi-independent communities, each with its own paradigm, rather than a linear succession of clearly differentiated models.

The dramatic rise of reception theory

The task of this chapter is not to rewrite Jauss's sketch of the history of literary theory, nor to correct or debunk his appropriation of the paradigm model. Rather, it is to try to understand how reception theory, which was virtually unknown in 1965, could have become so popular over the next decade. To this end the discussion of how paradigms change in literary scholarship is interesting because potentially it entails the appearance of reception theory itself. Although the “Paradigm” essay may not supply a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon, it does shed some light on how reception theory was perceived in the years of its inception: the kinds of claims, biases, and inconsistencies in Jauss's essay can be seen as indicators themselves of the way in which this “paradigm” was packaged, promoted, and consumed. In retrospect, however, it hardly seems to have required such a “hard sell.” Indeed, it has proved to be one of the most marketable items that the scholarly community ever produced. Whether one thinks of its appearance as a change in paradigm or, more modestly, as a shift in emphasis, no one today can seriously question the enormous impact that reception theory has had on the interpretation of literature and art.

A few examples should serve to document the magnitude of its effect. In 1977 a bibliography of over sixty pages appeared in Gunter Grimm's Rezeptionsgeschichte (History of Reception);² most of the entries had been published during the previous decade. In the past fifteen years at least five readers or essay collections have dealt with the field of reception or reader-oriented problems. The Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (LiLi) (1974), the Amsterdarner Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik (1974), Deutschunterricht (1977), Œuvres et Critiques (1977–8), and Poétique (1979) have devoted entire issues to the topic. Poetica has published, in 1975 and 1976, two tentative “balance sheets” (Zwischenbilanzen) on the “aesthetics of reception,” and the Conference of German Teachers in Stuttgart in 1972 devoted two entire sections as well as portions of others to an examination of this new development in theory. In 1979 the ninth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association was conducted under the general title “Literary Communication and Reception,” and its proceedings were published the next year in a 436-page volume.³ In terms of concrete application to literary subjects, almost no area has been ignored. In one form or another, reception theory has been used to discuss French troubadour lyrics, the English novel tradition, the nouveau roman, surrealism, the Nibelungenlied, Lessing's Emilia Galotti, Goethe's Werther, Gerhart Hauptmann's Weavers, Celan's “Thread suns,” Brecht's Keuner Stories, Grass's Local Anaesthetic, and a list of other topics too lengthy to enumerate here. From Marxists to traditional critics, from classical scholars and medievalists to modern specialists, virtually every methodological perspective and area of literary endeavor has responded to the challenge raised by reception theory.

Documenting the magnitude of the response among scholars and critics is easier, of course, than explaining why the response occurred. “Exhaustion” of old methods and “discontent” in general may have played a role in its rapid acceptance, but makeshift psychology of this sort inevitably raises more questions than it answers. Furthermore, it confounds symptoms with reasons. If a generation of scholars becomes disgruntled and dissatisfied with current critical practices, then these attitudes themselves are responses to, not causes for, change. The origins of this purportedly novel method must ultimately be sought within the context of German social, intellectual, and academic life during the period. It would be impossible to try to explain such an intricate development in a few sentences; but if we consider the appearance of reception theory as an answer to the methodological crisis in literary studies that arose during the 1960s, then we may be able to understand at least one facet of the interface between literary theory and the larger social sphere.

For this crisis in literary scholarship was in turn the outgrowth of a nexus of factors that penetrated almost every area of German life. At the risk of being charged with adherence to a positivist-historicist paradigm, we might explore the roots of this larger crisis with the following observations. In the economic sphere the end of the “economic miracle” and its promise of unlimited growth and prosperity as well as the first signs of recession in the middle of the decade contributed to a more questioning attitude in West Germany towards systemic and institutional structures. In the political arena, the end of the Adenauer era in 1963, the Great Coalition in 1966, and the rise to power of the SPD on a non-socialist basis are both symptoms of change and causes for further reflection (and action). It is no coincidence, for example, that the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) finds its beginnings in this atmosphere of economic and political transformation. The list of factors that are the results of and/or the impetus for change can be easily extended. The Eichmann trial in 1960–1 and the first sustained attempts to come to terms with the Third Reich historically, the final realization with the erection of the Berlin wall that hopes for German unity were futile, the recognition that West Germany was part of an “imperialist” coalition currently conducting a brutal campaign of destruction in Vietnam, the appearance of the student movement, the maturation of the first post-war and hence post-Nazi generation – all of these played some role in the development of a new consciousness in West German society, contributing to the altered mentality of the late 1960s.

Re-evaluating methodology and the canon

The most evident manifestations of a crisis in literary studies occurred in the field of German language and literature. Reacting against both the vestiges of National Socialist methodology and the post-war introduction of non-commit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE NEW ACCENT SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The change in paradigm and its socio-historical function
• 2 Influences and precursors
• 3 The major theorists
• 4 Alternative models and controversies
• 5 Problems and perspectives
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index