Lecture
Reception aesthetics (German: Rezeptionsästhetik; English: reader-response criticism; also known as the «aesthetics of effect») is a branch of aesthetics that studies the life of a text over time, its reception in different periods, and the dependence of interpretation on the socio-cultural situation; it is an aesthetics of the dialogue between text and reader. In literary theory it is a school of thought that focuses on the reader (or the «audience») and their experience of reading a literary work.
Although literary theory had long paid some attention to the role of the reader in the creation of meaning and to the experience of reading a literary work, reception aesthetics as a new direction in literary studies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, notably in Germany and the United States. In large part its emergence and formation are owed to hermeneutics (both literary and philosophical) and to phenomenology. Among the scholars who exerted a decisive influence one may name Hans-Georg Gadamer (philosophical hermeneutics), the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, Louise Rosenblatt, Clive Staples Lewis (the work «An Experiment in Criticism»), and others.
Reception aesthetics defines the reader as an active agent who confers «real existence» on the text and «constructs» its meaning through their own interpretation. Literature is here regarded as a performing art in which every reader creates their own, possibly unique, text within their own reading experience. Reception aesthetics takes into account and examines both historical (diachronic) and contemporary (synchronic) types of perception and reading of a work of art—that is, it takes into account the difference in perception depending on its historical moment. This school stands in complete opposition to the theory of the «formal school» and «New Criticism», in which the reader's role in recreating literary works is ignored. «New Criticism» emphasized that only what is given in the text is part of the text's meaning. No appeal to the personality or intentions of the author, or to the psychology of the reader, was permitted in the discussions of orthodox «New Critics».
There are numerous approaches within the theory of reception aesthetics, but all of them agree that the meaning of a text is formed by the reader directly, in the process of reading. Lois Tyson's attempts to systematize the whole range of theories of reception aesthetics into five categories made it evident that constructing such a classification is difficult, given the diversity and the contradictory character of the views and methods involved. Transactional reader-response theory, introduced by Louise Rosenblatt and supported by Wolfgang Iser, refers to the interaction between the «embedded» meaning of the text and its perception by the reader, which is shaped on the basis of individual emotions, experiences, and knowledge. Affective stylistics, created by Stanley Fish, holds that a text cannot exist without being read—that is, a text cannot have meaning independently of the reader. Subjective reader-response theory, most often associated with the name of David Bleich, is oriented exclusively toward the reader's response, which is given in written form and then compared with other readers' individual interpretations in order, ultimately, to arrive at a shared view of the text's meaning. The central idea of psychological reader-response theory, whose founder is Norman Holland, is that it is precisely the reader's motives that substantially influence the process of reading, and that subsequently the experience of reading can be used to analyze the reader's psychological response. Social reader-response theory is a continuation of Stanley Fish's earlier work and holds that any interpretation of a text is created on the basis of the «collective» ideas of a community whose members share a specific approach to reading and interpretation. In every such community, readers tend toward a particular form of interpretation, which takes shape on the basis of the strategies used during reading.
An alternative way of classifying theories of reception aesthetics is to divide them into three groups: the first comprises those oriented toward the individual reader's response (the «individualists»); the second comprises those guided by psychological experiments on particular groups of readers (the «experimentalists»); and the third comprises those who expect an identical response from all groups of readers (the «uniformists»). Another fundamental point of difference among the various theorists concerns the extent to which the reader «determines» the text. According to some theorists, reading and the formation of meaning depend on both the reader and the text; according to others, they depend on the reader alone.
The principal scholarly center that developed the theory and methodology of reception aesthetics in Europe was the University of Constance (West Germany), where the leading representatives of this school taught: the philologists Hans Robert Jauss, a specialist in Romance studies, and Wolfgang Iser, a specialist in English studies. The art historian Wolfgang Kemp successfully applied the ideas of reception aesthetics to the study of the visual arts in the 1980s. Other well-known followers of this school include G. Grimm and H. Link.
H. R. Jauss's conception is bound up above all with reception-historical research. Among his principal contributions one may cite, for example, the structure of the perception of art, which he presents as a product of the development of aesthetic experience. It comprises five levels, which arose in historical sequence but are now present together: the associative, the admirative, the sympathetic, the cathartic, and the ironic. These levels differ in the manner in which the reader identifies with, and builds a relationship to, the work and its characters. Jauss also raises the question of the criteria and principles underlying the selection of the body of texts that subsequently become classics. He links this to the perceiving subjects—the readers—in whose minds the evaluation of the text takes place on the basis of many factors. In connection with his study of the recipient as the key figure in this process, Jauss introduces the concepts of the «horizon of expectation» and «aesthetic distance». Gadamer had used the same concept of the «horizon» to designate the limits of a perceiving subject's understanding, given their era and situation; he also attributed a «horizon» to the work of art itself, and it is the fusion of these «horizons» that gives rise to understanding. In Jauss, this concept carries a similar meaning and encompasses the cultural and social norms of an era, experience and expectations (comparable to Gadamer's pre-understandings and prejudices), and so on. In the process of reading (perception), the recipient's «horizon of expectation» undergoes continual change, responding to the various signals embedded in the text, and expands. However, perception does not always prove to be truly fruitful and productive. The category of aesthetic distance, mentioned above, helps to reveal the productivity of a text's reception. It represents «the distance between the existing horizon of expectations and the appearance of a new work whose reception will bring about a change in that horizon of expectations…». When the aesthetic distance is very small, this generally means that we are dealing with a very simple, and perhaps even trivial, text that requires virtually no activity from the reader in the act of perception. Jauss considers the reconstruction of a work's horizon of expectations to be the central task, since it «reveals the difference between past and present ways of understanding a work» and «shows that literature is immortal, possesses an objective significance that is fixed once and for all, and is open to interpretation at any time».
In his conception, Wolfgang Iser describes the process of a first reading, the subsequent development of the text into a «whole», and how a dialogue takes place between reader and text. His theory was strongly influenced by the aesthetic studies of Roman Ingarden.
For him, meaning is not an object that can be found in the text, but is a living event of construction that occurs between the text and the reader. In particular, the reader turns to the text, which is a fixed world, but meaning is realized only through the act of reading and through the way the reader connects the structures of the text with their own experience. To illustrate this, Iser uses the example of constellations: «The impressions of the text arising from this process will differ from one individual to another, but the difference will be predetermined by the written text itself. Thus two people looking up at the night sky may be looking at the very same constellation, but one will see in it a plough, and the other a dipper. The „stars“ in a literary text are fixed; what changes are the mental lines that connect them». The literary work that is created when reader and text meet consists of two «poles»: the artistic (the object, the text created by the author) and the aesthetic (the realization achieved by the reader). Both of these poles contribute to the two central points of Iser's theory: the concept of the «implied reader» and narrative «gaps».
For Iser, a literary work consists of both written and unwritten parts of the text. When the recipient begins to read, the sentences that make up the work not only inform them of the movement of the plot but also create certain expectations in the reader's mind. However, these expectations are rarely fulfilled, since the text is usually full of «unexpected turns and disappointed expectations… Thus, when the flow of the narrative is interrupted and we are led in an unexpected direction, we are given the opportunity to bring our own capacity for establishing connections into play, and to fill in the gaps in the text ourselves». These gaps are the unwritten part of the text, requiring the participation of the reader. Different readers choose to fill different gaps in different ways, allowing for inexhaustible realizations of the text within the limits provided by interpretation. Insofar as the reader reflects on what they have read earlier in the text, or if they reread the text, new light is shed on the events of the narrative, since «certain aspects of the work will, in light of this knowledge, acquire a significance we did not attach to them on first reading, while others will recede into the background».
Thus, the structure of the text gives rise to expectations that are interrupted by an unexpected non-fulfillment, creating gaps that require the reader to fill them in order to produce a coherent flow of the text. These gaps, in turn, compel the reader to reread earlier events in the text in light of the gaps now being filled. However, these gaps cannot be filled arbitrarily, but only within the limits of interpretation laid down by the author in the text. Iser believes that this experience breaks down the subject-object relationship, since «text and reader no longer confront each other as object and subject; instead, the „division“ occurs within the reader themselves»[10]. In the act of reading, the text becomes a living object within the reader.
Both Iser and Jauss directed reception aesthetics toward the study of the text by defining readers from the standpoint of the text. In a similar vein, Gerald Prince posits the «narratee», Michael Riffaterre the «superreader», Stanley Fish the «informed reader», and so on. The figure of the «model reader» in Umberto Eco's conception can also be placed in this series, although Eco himself is not usually classed within the tradition of reception aesthetics. In addition, many other scholars simply speak of the figure of «the reader», who embodies all readers.
Two Girls Reading by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Representatives of the tradition of reception aesthetics hold that, in order to understand a text, one must look at the experience of reading, at how readers «create» the meaning of a text in the process of perceiving it. Traditional, text-centered schools (such as formalism) tend to view reception aesthetics as a current of anarchic subjectivism, since, according to its premises, a reader may interpret a text however he or she wishes. They maintain that a text can be understood while remaining unaffected by one's own culture, status, personality, and so forth, and hence «objectively».
Reception aesthetics, however, treats reading as being simultaneously a subjective and an objective process. Some representatives of reception aesthetics (the uniformists) propose a bi-active model of reading, in which the literary work partly controls the response and the reader partly controls it. Others, who regard this position as internally contradictory, maintain that the reader controls the entire interaction with the text (the individualists).
A further objection to reception aesthetics is that it fails to take into account that a text can expand the reader's understanding. While readers may indeed invest their own ideas and experiences in a text, they may at the same time come to form a new understanding of something thanks to the text. This is something that some theories of reception aesthetics fail to take into account.
On the whole, reception aesthetics' expansion of the bounds of artistic meaning, its totalization of the world of art, its bestowal of a self-sufficient artistic status on the act of encounter between aesthetic matter and the recipient, and a number of its other ideas theoretically unlocked many prohibitions within the world of art. Indeed, the emergence of a number of contemporary artistic practices (conceptualism, actionism, and others) owes much, in the postmodern era, to the reflexive work of reception aesthetics.
Although, in theoretical terms, the movement of reception aesthetics never coalesced into a single system, it has developed and grounded within its framework an enormous number of concepts that are actively, constructively, and heuristically employed in the aesthetic reflections of various contemporary schools of poststructuralism and post- and post-postmodernism. The basic concepts of reception aesthetics that structure its theory—actualization, concretization, aesthetic experience, aesthetic distance, identification, the strategy of the text, horizon of expectation, the constitution of meaning, communicative determinacy/indeterminacy, and others—attest to an integrating expansion of phenomenology in the aesthetic apprehension and mastery of cultural reality.
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