Reception theory

The reception theory is a movement of literary criticism that arises from the hermeneutics and phenomenology of the 1950s, as a response to the lack of importance given to the reader by the theories of Russian formalism., by New Criticism and by Marxist authors such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin.

Background

Phenomenology is the main antecedent of reception theory, and comes from the works of the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). This proposes that, although as individuals we cannot ensure the independent existence of objects outside our knowledge, the way in which they are presented to us is certain. In this way, the objects we find have a direct relationship with the way we find them (or, better said, "with the shape they have when we find them"); our consciousness, which is the one that perceives them, defines our perception of them. Thus, we can avoid questions about ultimate reality or the possibility of knowing the world, and simply describe it as it appears to consciousness, considering objects as isolated phenomena. Focused on literature, Phenomenology produced a critique dedicated to describing the 'world' of a specific author's consciousness. Critics of this current, such as Georges Poulet and J. Hillis Miller, seek to discover the way in which a particular author perceives and constitutes his personal vision of the universe, as represented in the entire range of his works.

On the other hand, the reflections expressed by the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) directly influenced Wolfgang Iser, with his theory of the 'concretization' or 'realization' of a text, where he establishes that reading is a dynamic process through which the reader fixes or creates the potential meaning of the text.

The hermeneutics of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) is also important, mainly the notion of 'fusion of horizons', and the cultural baggage that each individual brings when obtaining new knowledge; Gadamer insists that each individual is conditioned by his historical consciousness, and thus interprets knowledge or truth in different ways.

Lines of thought

Reception theory is divided into two basic lines of thought, both focused on placing the reader in an active position with respect to the text, not only as a passive recipient of textual structures or formal effects, but as a key part of the process of concretizing a text in the act of reading. The first, the Aesthetics of Reception, comes from phenomenology and is represented by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, and proposes that a text is the answer to the questions proposed by a 'horizon of expectations'. Interpretation of works should, then, focus not on the experience of an individual reader, but on the history of a work's reception, and its relationship to the changing norms of aesthetics and the sets of expectations that enable its reading. at different times.

The second line, the 'reader response theory', is mostly of American origin, and uses different techniques to approach the reader, such as the use of psychology in the theories proposed by Norman Holland and David Bleich, semiotics in those of Michael Riffaterre, and hermeneutics in Stanley Fish's approach. These theorists define the work as what is presented in the reader's consciousness; It can then be said that the work is not objective, nor does it exist independently of any experience of it, but rather it is the experience of the reader. Criticism can then become a description of the reader's progressive movement through a text, analyzing how readers produce meaning by making connections, filling in blanks, anticipating and conjecturing events in the text, as well as seeing their expectations confirmed or refuse later.

Important figures

Hans Robert Jauss

Hans Robert Jauss is commonly known as the leading figure in reception theory; However, Jauss does not engage within the framework of reader response as do other relevant figures, such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish. Jauss's analysis occurs through the criticism of two completely opposite branches in literary theory: on the one hand, he criticizes the school of Russian formalism due to its lack of historical dimension; On the other hand, he criticizes the Marxist current for the emphasis it gives to the literary text as a pure historical product.

The analysis that Jauss provides to the theory of reception is based primarily on Gadamer's concept of the 'fusion of horizons', where it is explained that a fusion takes place between past experiences that are expressed in the text and in the interest of its current readers. In this way, the relationship between the original reception of a literary text and how it is perceived in different historical stages up to the present is discussed. Jauss's objection to the Marxist current is that, if the original reception of literary texts is not considered, they are understood inadequately since only their form of production would be taken into account.

What Jauss proposes is a new type of literary history, in which the role of the critic is that of mediator between how the text was perceived in the past and how it is perceived in the present. According to Jauss, this relationship needs to be considered continuously, since he firmly believes that one of the primary justifications for literary studies is that they allow one to perceive the fundamental difference between past and present. At the same time, they allow this difference to be partially overcome through direct contact with texts as human products, even when they come from unknown cultures.

Wolfgang Iser

Wolfgang Iser is considered one of the main representatives of reception theory along with Jauss. His main theories are supported considerably by Ingarden's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics. Iser's theory proposes to take into account the importance of the reader in the same way as reader response criticism. However, Iser differed in some aspects of this criticism, since he believed that the text has an objective structure, even though this structure must be completed by the reader.

What is relevant about Iser's theory is that it states that all literary texts create "blank spaces" that must be filled by the reader through his imagination. This is an inevitable process, where the reader seeks to unify the text and make it coherent, through a continuous process that develops at the time of reading. Iser proposes that, in the interaction between the text and the reader, the aesthetic response is created through a series of conjectures, inferences, logical leaps, and assumptions on the part of the reader, which are constantly modified according to the compatibility of the text with said conjectures on the part of the reader.

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish emphasizes the temporal nature of the reading process and argues that the meaning of a literary text cannot be separated from the reader's experience. This position has gone through considerable development since 1970 when he wrote his essay 'Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics'. In this essay, Fish confronts the objection that reader-based theory inevitably leads to relativism by arguing that responses that are completely subjective are impossible, since they cannot exist in isolation from the set of norms., systems of thought, etc. In this way, Fish argues that the subject-object dichotomy breaks down because there are no pure subjects, nor pure objects.

This brings us to the premise of Fish's analysis, which would be explained as follows: because the object (the literary text included) is always constructed by the subject, or, to be more precise, constructed by a group of subjects, this process will be interpreted from an "interpretive community". What Fish means by such a community is that different sets and norms of reading strategy produce different communities of interpreters. The radical position that Fish adopts in this regard is to affirm that apparent characteristics of literary texts such as meter, rhyme and other types of patterns are the product of interpretive strategies.

David Bleich

David Bleich is related to 'subjective criticism'. In his analysis, Bleich takes to an extreme the perspective that literary meaning is not found in the text, but in the readers. Bleich is often associated with Norman Holland and the 'Buffalo school'. However, Bleich maintains a critical stance with reference to Holland's emphasis on the "transactive" between the reader and the text. Bleich proposes giving greater importance to the reader's emotional response when determining the way a text is read.

Bleich's analysis, like Fish's, is given through the criticism of the reader's main response, which is based on the premise that the object does not have an existence separate from the subject and that there have been explored the implications of this for literary criticism. In contrast to Jauss's reception theory, reader response criticism places little emphasis on the original reception of a work, and, compared to Iser's proposal, this theory denies that the work contains objective limits that affect to the reader.