Hans Robert Jauss

"Literary history as a challenge to literary theory"

K. M. Newton

pp. 189-194

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

My attempt to bridge the gap between literature and history, between historical and aesthetic approaches begins at the point at which both [the Marxist and the Formalist] schools stop. Their methods conceive the literary fact within the closed circle of an aesthetics of production and of representation. In doing so, they deprive literature of a dimension that inalienably belongs to its aesthetic character as well as to its social function: the dimension of its reception and influence. Reader, listener, and spectator — in short, the factor of the audience — play an extremely limited role in both literary theories. Orthodox Marxist aesthetics treats the reader — if at all — no differently from the author: it inquires about his social position or seeks to recognize him in the structure of a represented society. The Formalist school needs the reader only as a perceiving subject who follows the directions in the text in order to distinguish the [literary] form or discover the [literary] procedure. … Both methods lack the reader in his genuine role, a role as unalterable for aesthetic as for historical knowledge: as the addressee for whom the literary work is primarily destined. …

Cited authors

Marx Karl