Hans Robert Jauss and Classicity

Abstract

In 1967, Hans Robert Jauss's Literary History as Provocation of Literary Theory marked the beginning of the aesthetic of reception as one of the most powerful new currents in German literary theory.' The provocation consisted in a new conception of literary history aimed to reform and newly legitimate the study of literature in Germany. In the revolutionary turmoil of the sixties, literary studies, based as they were on a canonical approach to the great works, had increasingly come under attack as reflecting and perpetuating the status quo of establishment culture. Jauss's Provocation proved worthy of its title: it had a tremendous impact, both immediately and in the long run.2 His provocative concept of literary history explicitly eliminated classicity as a historical category, and, if followed to its true consequences, would have done away altogether with literary tradition as we understand it. Since then, however, Jauss has withdrawn a considerable distance from this radical stance to a position where it is no longer a question of whether literary traditions should be accepted, but instead, of how they should be accepted. My study aims to demonstrate this development by tracing Jauss's changing attitude toward the concept of classicity. Jauss himself sees nothing wrong with changing positions. Literary critics, after all, participate in the dialectic of the historical process, where insight or truth is a function of time. In his most recent revisionary work, a reappraisal of Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory, Jauss appeals in this matter to Adorno himself, who attributes a temporal nucleus to truth.3 In the preface of his latest book, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Jauss aligns the evolution of his theoretical views with the fate of reform enthusiasm in West Germany from the late sixties to the midseventies.4 The classics, i.e. German literature of the age of Goethe, were a focal point of the controversies during that attempt at cultural revolution