Hans Robert Jauss proposes an aesthetics of reception to mediate between Marxist and formalist literary theories. He presents seven theses: 1) Literary history demands removing biases and considering how works were received by readers. 2) Readers understand works within expectations of genre, themes, and language. 3) A work's influence depends on how it meets a presupposed audience's expectations, which can change. 4) Reconstructing expectations reveals what a work answered and how readers understood it. 5) Meaning and form emerge through a work's unfolding understanding within literary traditions. 6) Literary history can analyze moments synchronically like linguistics. 7) Literature's social function depends on how it shapes readers' worldviews and behavior

1. Literary History as a Challenge
to Literary Theory
Hans Robert Jauss

2. Debate:
Marxist Literary Theory Formalist Theory
• inquires about his [the • reader as a perceiving
reader's] social subject who follows
position or seeks to the directions in the
recognize him in the text in order to
structure of a distinguish the form
represented society or discover the
procedure

3. Both methods lack the reader in his genuine role...:
as the addressee for whom the literary work is
primarily destined.

4. The perspective of the aesthetics of reception
mediates...
If the history of literature is viewed in this
way...the opposition between its aesthetic and its
historical aspects is also continually mediated.

5. Jauss' Seven Theses

6. Thesis 1
A renewal of literary history demands
(1) removal of the prejudices of historical
objectivism
(2) traditional aesthetics of production and
representation in an asthetics of reception and
influence
Historicity of literature rests... on the preceding
experience of the literary work by its readers.

7. MEANING
Producer's
Reader's
horizon of
perception
expectation

8. Thesis 2
The literary experience of the reader
(takes place)...within the objectifiable system of
expectations that arises for each work
• preunderstanding of the genre
• form and themes of already familiar works
• opposition between poetic and practical language

9. Thesis 3
Horizon of expectations of a work - determine its
artistic character by the kind and the degree of its
influence on a presupposed audience.
...reception can result in a "change of horizons"...
...aesthetic distance can be objectified historically
along a spectrum of the audience's reactions...

10. Thesis 4
The reconstruction of the horizon of expectations...
enables one
(1) to pose questions that the text gave an
answer to
(2) to discover how the contemporary reader could
have viewed and understood the work
A work sets out to answer a
specific question.

11. Thesis 5
The theory of the aesthetics of reception
- allows one to conceive the meaning and form of a
literary work in the historical unfolding of its
understanding.
- demands that one insert the individual work into
its "literary series" to recognize its historical
position and significance in the context of the
experience of literature.

12. Thesis 6
The achievements made in linguistics through the
distinction and methodological interrelation of
diachronic and synchronic analysis are the occasion
for overcoming the diachronic perspective--
previously the only one practiced--in literary history
as well.
...take a synchronic cross-section of a moment in
the development...

13. Thesis 7
The task of literary history is thus completed when
literary production is...also seen as "special history"
in its own unique relationship to "general history."
The social function of literature manifests itself in
its genuine possibility only where the literary
experience of the reader enters into the horizon of
expectations of his lived praxis, preforms his
understanding of the world, and thereby also has
an effect on his social behavior.