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Jauss's reception theory applied toD.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
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Giorgio Rebollini TMA 04 Personal Identifier W2032884 AA810 Choose one of the contemporary theoretical approaches to literature discussed in A Handbook to Literary Research (feminist theory, deconstruction, reader-response and reception, New Historicism or post-colonial theory). Give an account of the main features of your chosen theory, and show how it might be used to illuminate our understanding of two of the following novels: New Grub Street, The Story of an African Farm, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers. The first part of this essay will consist in an outline of the Reader-response and reception theory, with particular referent to the work of Hans Robert Jauss. This will be followed by an analysis of how it illuminates our understanding of Sons and Lovers and Jude the Obscure. Reader-Response and Reception Theory are umbrella terms which refer to different approaches to Literary Theory and involving a variety of critics. From the Konstanz school of Jauss and Iser to the more subjective American one led by Stanley Fish. With the advent of post-structuralism meaning is said to be indeterminate, not ¡¥in the text¡¦ but in the language nuances and conventions of the reader who, in turn, constructs the meaning of the text . According to Stanley Fish the reader belongs to a particular interpretative community and will therefore create the texts according to those codes. For him there is no ¡¥objective¡¦ work of literature, the reader ¡¥is¡¦ the writer. His attitude to language is pragmatist and subjective; so the question is not, as for Jauss and Iser, what the text does to us (a the natural assumption being that there is an objective text acting on the reader!), but rather what the reader does to the text or how he ¡¥creates¡¦ the text through the reading experience. The obvious question one could ask is what does the reader create or interpret when he reads? David Bleich, Norman Holland and Robert Crosman continue in an even greater subjective tone the approach of the American school. These view reader¡¦s response not as one ¡¥guided¡¦ by the text but rather totally dictated by the deep-seated needs of the reader. One form of this is the Psychoanalytical view, where the individual¡¦s psyche creates the meaning of the text in response to the work. The ideological view instead is one where the emphasis is placed on the encounter of the political ideology of the text and the reader. In both the America and Konstanz schools different positions are adopted in relation to the following considerations: „X The importance, if any, of the text, the words on the page or the screen. „X The extent to which knowledge is subjective or objective, or the balance between and relationship of the two. „X How the gap, historically, culturally and semiotically between the reader and the writer is bridged, and the extent to which this is possible. „X The importance and conditioning of the particular cultural circumstances of the reader versus the mainly private and personal response to the text. „X An analysis of the reading process. „X The role of the reader in forming the literary canon and literary history. „X The relative importance of the text created by the author and the interpretation of the reader. „X How each reader comes to a text with his/her own horizon. In this essay the theory put forward by Hans Robert Jauss, ¡§Rezeptionsasthetik¡¨, will be the main focus. Yet a brief mention of the work of Wolfang Iser seems appropriate because it complements the ideas put forward by Jauss. Iser¡¦s Phenomenological view sees the text functioning as a set of instructions for its own processing, but is incomplete and needs to be concretized or realised in the act of reading. This reality and the meaning lie between the text and the reader and is the result of their dialectical intercourse. Iser¡¦s main concern was the investigation of the process of reading in the interaction of reader and text. (1) Like the Russian Formalists, Iser sees textual devices as stimulating the reader to generate meaning by filling in the ¡¥blanks¡¦ or ¡¥gaps¡¦. Using their imagination different readers will fill in the gaps of the text in different ways. The reader fills in, completes, connects these gaps; creates in his/her mind aspects of a work that are not in the text but incited by the text. The text is like a mirror through which the reader¡¦s experience comes into play, thus completing the meaning. The text sets the parameters for the readers but does not present the whole picture. The text therefore has a dual role: a written one, where the scene is set and an unwritten one, the opportunity for the reader to fulfil it through his imagination and this is referred to as ¡¥konkretisation¡¦, realization. Iser describes the reading process as a ¡§living event¡¨; (1) in so doing, he develops Roman Ingarden¡¦s phenomenological approach to thinking and reading. Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the reader- response theory to literature. (2) She was aware that to put forward the idea that a work presupposes a reader actively involved with the text, that a poem is cooperatively produced by a reader and a text, would be particularly shocking to both Formalitsts and New Critics. For the latter this would simply be the capital sin of ¡¥affective fallacy¡¦ and mark the end for the search of the ¡¥objective¡¦ meaning in favour relativism resulting in several interpretations, all equally valid, dependent on what the reader brought to the text. This approach is primarily associated with the work of Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss drew from the philosophy of Hans-Geor Gadamer (b. 1900) who, following Martin Heidegger, insisted that historical interpretation is relative, since our present and limited historical perspectives condition our judgement, or ¡¥horizon¡¦. Heidegger was influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche who condemned the whole of the metaphysical tradition, from Plato¡¦s Republic onwards, as a lie. Unlike Kant, according to whom what we experience as reality is shaped by our mental categories which are stable and transcendent; he proposed that there are no grounding truths, that history and experience are fragmented and subjective. For Heidegger, and Gadamer after him, an observer is automatically a participant; meaning only arises when contextualized; individuals live in their own world composed of a variety of structures and images. A particular cultural perspective mediated through language and symbols therefore conditions interpretation. Jauss has adopted this hermeneutical approach and applied it to literary theory. If interpretation is dependent on the interpreter, then the importance of the author¡¦s intention is considerably diminished. Yet there is some permanence in that the interpreter of history interprets from within history and fills in the gaps from its continuity of customs, tradition, patterns of thought and language with the contemporary culture. The particular historical event/period (or text of a particular time) is linked through them to the present response of the interpreter/reader. Jauss first proposed his views on the theory of reception in a lecture at Constance(3). Here he is mainly concerned with the development of literary history. On the one hand he attempts to find a middle way between the aestheticism of Formalism which espouses the autonomous character of art and on the other the social preoccupation of Marxism which reduces art to a reflection of social forces; at the same time he preserves the central concerns for aesthetics and history. He links history and literature through the concept of the ¡¥evolutionary¡¦ nature of both, but is careful in maintaining the artistic nature of literature and avoids reducing it simply to a historical commentary. (4) The reader and his reactions to a text in a particular time play a crucial part in this exercise. The text operates from a particular horizon and is approached from different horizons; hence, there is an interaction between the world of the text as it was created and the world of the reader(s). The interpretation and consequent meaning of a text is the result of the merging of the interpreter¡¦s horizon and that of the text; this is ¡¥Horizontverschmelzung¡¦. Both the text as constructed by the author and the text as read by the reader are important. A reader approaches a text from a particular horizon of expectations: literal, cultural and social; however, he must constantly revise his horizon in terms of what is presented to him. This revision sets before him a new horizon, which in turn will face new challenges. The reader is engaged in a dialogue with the text and, as he does so, he has to challenge the validity of the horizon within him and be prepared to modify it. The difference of horizons, the text¡¦s and the reader¡¦s, is the aesthetic gap, the focus of both historical interpretation and the reader¡¦s self- reflection. We fill in the gaps of the texts, but the text simultaneously questions our assumptions and demands modification. In the past, the objective approach concentrated only on the texts as created by specific authors at specific times and bears a limited but specific range of meanings that the authors could have intended and which were in principle open to the texts¡¦ first readers. It was an attempt to restore the texts to their original contexts in order to recapture their initial, intended meanings. With the subjective stance, instead the meaning of a text is literally created in the act of its being read at any particular time; with different meanings at different times as the literary history of a text evolves. The text offers certain perspectives of the world and provides the reader with a variety of possibilities supplied by the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader. A dialectic is established during the reading process with continually changing positions. The text does not have a meaning but potential for meanings which arise through the text being read. These specific meanings or ¡¥konkretisationen¡¦ vary according to who does the reading, when, where, with what expectations and for what purposes. Different readers at the same time, the same reader at different times, and different readers at different times will understand apparently the ¡¥same¡¦ text differently. This process is not wholly subjective since the reader¡¦s role is pre-structured by the different perspectives represented in the text. Jauss maintains that a text has an artistic quality of its own; it offers different ¡¥schemata¡¦ with a potential ¡¥multivalency¡¦ realized (konkretisiert) through a variety of changing ¡¥sensitive¡¦ receptions or interpretations. A literary history then traces changing receptions and can provide an answer to why certain works of art are durable and others are not. This process involves an awareness of the tradition of interpretations; reconstruct the ¡¥erwartungshorizont¡¦ in which a text was produced and received and thus begin to account for its originality and the recognition that since reception is creative and therefore meaning is ever changing.
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