Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Theory & History of Literature) [Hardcover]

Hans Robert Jauss (Author)

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Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 399 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (December 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816610037
• ISBN-13: 978-0816610037
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,584,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Essential Misunderstood Theorist, May 20, 2010

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This review is from: Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

For decades, now, H.R. Jauss's approach to literary history and analysis has gathered practicing adherents among scholars and critics in America, but the undeserved scorn leveled at the ideas and the adherents has been puzzling and self-destructive. In the United States, where the German national crises are not even rumors, we hear, "Oh, that's not 'theory': it wants the canon!" or "Sure, reader response... whatever."

In fact, Jauss's theories have been a philosophically vital way of reconciling history and hermeneutics. Marxism -- even post-Hegelianism now calling itself Marxism -- can frequently define its theory and then demand that the art fit the method. Jauss, on the other hand, is not the spokesman for The Tradition as much as the concept of tradition as itself an ideologically active target for analysis, and his "reader response" is nothing to do with feelings and psychology.

This is the third volume in his philosophy of reception aesthetics, and it has taken a while to come. There is an exasperation in the tone, an exasperation with other academics who, instead of reading and considering ideas, want, instead, to act out personal or ideological interests by falling into the most twee of all things: academic "schools" of aesthetic theory. Every literary scholar will need, sooner or later (probably later, given the self-absorption of the species), to read this, and every person interested in why, to take one example, Longfellow was so "great" as to be the first American poet buried at Westminster Abbey and now is so ridiculous that few read him. Did the text change? Read Jauss.