Reception aesthetics
The aesthetics of reception is one of the different literary theories that analyze the reader's response to literary texts; In this school, special emphasis is placed on the way readers are received, conceived as a historical collective. The main theorist is Hans Robert Jauss, who has been writing since the late 1960s, along with Wolfgang Iser and Harald Weinrich. Reception theory exerted great influence until the mid-1980s, especially in Germany and Western Europe. It parallels studies of the "model reader" of Umberto Eco and the English literary theory of the "reader's response criticism".
This textual analysis focuses on the field of "negotiation" and "opposition" over part of the audience. This implies that a text (be it a book, a film, or any other creative work) is not always interpreted with the same motivations for which it was written, but rather that the reader does so based on their individual cultural background and experiences. lived. The variation of this "cultural background" it explains why some accept certain interpretations of a text while others reject them. From this it follows that the author's intention can vary considerably from the interpretation given by the reader.
Jauss thus distinguishes 2 types of horizons:
- Horizon of expectations: Implicated directly in the work.
- Horizon of experiences: Submitted by the receiver.
The investigator can find the literary communication between them, hidden by what is usually called "literary facts". The goal of new research oriented towards an aesthetics of reception is to demand a literary theory capable of taking into account the interaction between production and reception.
The aesthetics of reception restores the active role of the reader in the successive concretion of the meaning of the works throughout history. It differs almost explicitly from a historical sociology of the public that is interested only in changes of taste, interests or ideologies.
The aesthetics of reception supports a dialectical conception: from its perspective, the history of interpretations of a work of art is an exchange of experiences or, if you like, a dialogue, a game of questions and answers.