Reception aesthetics

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The reception aesthetics asks about the mental and emotional perception of artistic works and to what extent it is already created in the object or only in the process of reception is produced.

First a branch of literary theory, it now deals with all the arts. Reception is derived from the Latin recipere (receive, receive), aesthetics from the ancient Greek αἴσθησις aísthesis ( perception ). Occasionally, the aesthetic of reception is also referred to as the Konstanz school after its place of origin . The Anglo-Saxon variant of reception aesthetics is called reader-response criticism .

Several currents can now be compared with one another under the term. The differentiation takes place primarily with regard to the theoretical concepts with which meaning is created here. Most of the currents are concerned with the understanding that the object itself generates by starting from a position of understanding and supplying it with information - an "implicit" reader designed by the text itself. The interpretation should determine what this presumed recipient must understand when the text (or any work of art in its meanings) is fully developed. As an extension of this approach, research can record how understanding unfolded historically. Research directions that are interested in real “empirical” readers, historically verifiable recipients and their “reception certificates”, notes in diaries and letters, for example, from which it can be seen how they read certain books, experienced certain music, saw certain images, are generally already assigned to the social history of literature or art, even if they can claim the term for themselves in the interest of its further development.

The main representatives of the Konstanz school were the Romance scholar Hans Robert Jauß , the Latin scholar Manfred Fuhrmann , the English scholar Wolfgang Iser and the German scholar Wolfgang Preisendanz .

Problem

The aesthetics of reception is, in a larger context, a response to the literary interpretation of the 19th century, which had an impact on the 20th century. What their currents had in common was a strong interest in the author and his intentions as well as the aim of interpreting the work of art as an artifact of a time and nation, reading it as the key to understanding other epochs and cultures.

In the 20th century, it was particularly the interpretative approaches inherent in the text that opposed this reading offer. In the interest of directing research back to the object, the work of art , the question of what gives this work of art its particular aesthetic value and what exactly is its art compared to less perfect artifacts has been asked in currents such as New Criticism .

The aesthetic of reception breaks with these interpretive approaches - but not completely. It pushes questions about the work back against questions about the perception it triggers, and it opens up questions about the process in which the perception occurs, about the information that flows into it, also about the horizons of understanding that the work of art implies or in open allusions. A return to the question of what the author wanted to say is thus excluded - this question is at best part of the effect that the text has. The question of how the text works, how it works, what makes it exciting, what gives it charm, what it does with the reader, is in the center, as in the text-immanent interpretations, but now much more clearly. Skepticism remains here towards the empirically verifiable reader. According to the theory, he ideally uses possibilities that are laid out in the text. In the worse case, however, he imposes a meaning of his choice on the text. The literary scholar, on the other hand, acts as a reader who investigates theoretically given reading opportunities with the text; The entire “history of reception”, the history of understanding that a work finds, can be seen as part of the field of investigation with a corresponding understanding of the term: This is where possible understandings unfold, here possible horizons of understanding emerge in the course of historical exploration. Among the representatives of the aesthetics of reception, there was still a dispute about how to deal with these expansions, which extend into social history as well as into cultural and specialist history.

The aesthetics of reception as an ultimately unclearly positioned project attracted criticism. The horizons of understanding she asked about could not be established as clearly as hoped. Research that simply contextualizes its objects in relation to other documents dealt more openly with the problem of the researcher who creates a position of understanding (as with contemporary documents of reception, which in the strict reception aesthetics were sometimes dismissed as unhelpful, incidental to misleading readings).

Positions

For both Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser , the text-reader confrontation is the most important point of reference for the constitution of meaning in the act of reading.

In his famous inaugural lecture, Hans Robert Jauß puts the historical course of the reception of a work and thus its meaning in the foreground. The view of a work is initially always that of the reader's presence. However, in order to understand the work in the sense of Jauss' hermeneutical conception - which Iser does not share because he is interested in text theory - the history of reception, i.e. how the work was understood at what time, must also be taken into account. According to Jauß, the aesthetic content is to be measured by whether a work causes a change of horizon for the reader (that would be classic, aesthetically valuable) or not (trivial literature, trash for short).

According to Wolfgang Iser, the “aesthetic content” of a text is only produced in the process of reading. He does not make the above distinction and is, however, oriented quite differently. The following terms are important to him: place of indeterminacy / blanks, schematic view, implicit reader, etc. The meaning of the text unfolds as communication with an "implicit reader" - a text-theoretical instance, ie an instance of the, if you will, imagined reader, laid out in the text.

For Iser, the “professional reader” / “ideal reader” is fundamental. In this sense, this is the experienced reader who has in-depth literary experience and knowledge and is thus able to recognize the signals and cross-references in the text. The aesthetics of reception, or aesthetics of effect, proved to be partly a continuation of the existing practice of interpretation. Jauß and Iser's investigations were shaped by the communication model with (deciphering) recipient. Jauß ' hermeneutic approach, which goes back to Hans-Georg Gadamer , tries to understand the hermeneutic circle , while Iser - as mentioned above - is interested in the text, its nature and structure. However, the meaning of the text is strongly predetermined by the implicit reader. The literary scholarship was given a privileged position with the statements: it can develop meanings that real readers have not yet developed; namely when it proves which aesthetic experience the sender pre-designed for the recipient. With poetological expertise and knowledge of time horizons, literary studies come to the aid of real readers. On the other hand, she gains new control. So she may well come to the conclusion that the author was not thinking of a reader who dares to venture this or that new interpretation, and is telling this reader that he is playing his own game here - a scientifically unsustainable one.

The work of the Konstanz School was most likely to bring about historical reader research through the resistance it provoked. The question of historical evidence of the handling of texts, of actual reception certificates, of readers' diary entries, of letters that show how texts were read, arose far more in the sociology of literature and book studies . Representatives of the Konstanz school noted the threat of narrowing down research, its restriction to random documents and their time-related perspectives. Research threatens to come to a standstill here, where the exploration of textual meaning that has not yet been realized must remain the goal.

The art historian Wolfgang Kemp is a central representative in art history . In his approach, he refers to the aesthetics of reception in literary studies and argues that art studies should not refuse the methodology, because in the fine arts there is a particularly close relationship between viewer and image and only the mutual relationship between the two enables the development of the Work of art as well as its purpose.

See also

Literature (selection)

  • Umberto Eco : Lector in fabula. The cooperation of the interpretation in narrative texts . Munich (3rd edition) 1998.
  • Roman Ingarden : On recognizing the literary work of art . Tubingen 1968.
  • Wolfgang Iser : The implicit reader. Forms of communication of the novel from Bunyan to Beckett . Munich 1972.
  • Wolfgang Iser: The appeal structure of the texts . In: R. Warning (Ed.): Reception aesthetics . 4th edition, Munich 1994, pp. 228-252.
  • Hans Robert Jauß : History of literature as a provocation of literary studies . In: R. Warning (Ed.): Reception aesthetics . 4th edition, Munich 1994, pp. 126-162.
  • Wolfgang Kemp (Ed.): The viewer is in the picture. Art history and reception aesthetics . Ostfildern 1991.
  • Ulrich HJ Körtner : The inspired reader . Goettingen 1994.
  • Horst Turk : Aesthetic effects. Theory and interpretation of the literary effect . edition text, Munich 1976.
  • Harald Weinrich : For a literary history of the reader . In: Ders .: Literature for Readers . Stuttgart 1970, pp. 23-34.
  • Klaus Semsch: Reception Aesthetics . In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Volume 7, Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, 1363-1374.
  • Simone Winko, Tilmann Köppe: Reception Aesthetics . In this. (Ed.): Newer literary theories. An introduction. Metzler 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-02059-8 , pp. 85-96.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinz Antor: Reception aesthetics , in Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, 5th edition, Stuttgart 2013, 650–652.