Critical Summaries

A critique of the reader-response critic Robert Jauss

ABOUT JAUSS

• Hermeneutics--deals with the determination of meaning; Poetics--concerned with "the taxonomy and interaction of poetic structures"--56
• They are interdependent: you need to know what is going on poetically (metaphor, etc.) in order to grasp meaning, and you have to understand the relationship of the content in order to ascertain the form it's in--56
• "The synthesis [...] of poetics with hermeneutics" is the ambition of reader-response criticism--57
• Jauss describes the historical consciousness of a given period as a "horizon of expectation." New works initially stand out--"silhouetted"--against the background, then become part of a background against which even newer works stand--58-9
• "The historical reading as reception mediates between the formal structure and social change" or between "structure and interpretation." Example of Emma Bovary, who, by her formal aspects, "engenders, in the mind of her readers, a critical awareness of social conventions strong enough to put these conventions in question."--60

DE MAN'S RESPONSE TO JAUSS

MAJOR CRITICISM:

• Argues that the psychology of perception cannot necessarily be applied to literature, because language involves many obstacles to understanding, as the phenomenal world does not. Hence Jauss's "horizon of expectation" metaphor may be wrong--62

MINOR CRITICISMS:

• Criticizes Jauss's overreaching use of the aesthetic in his reading of Baudelaire's Spleen. Suggests he overlooks the "play" of the signifier--semantic effects on the level of the word (such as paranomasia). Instead of treating these to objective linguistic analysis, he subjects them to aesthetic judgment. In other words, he incorrectly decides "whether a statement in [the] text is to be taken as a figure or à la lettre" when dealing with a specific wordplay ("Boucher"/"débouché") in Baudelaire--64-66
• Criticizes Jauss's deductions about periodization based on analysis of rhetorical tropes as being "mimetic," as serving a confirmation bias--67
• Accuses Jauss of misunderstanding Benjamin's conception of allegory as "anorganic." De Man, like Hegel and (he argues) Benjamin, insists that allegory is completely "materialistic" "because its dependence on [...] the literalism of the letter cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses." Disagrees with Jauss's suggestion that allegory can reverse itself into beauty--68
• Argues against Jauss's understanding of the sphinx in Spleen II as the figure of the poetic voice producing the poem, and his characterization of the sphinx as holding memories. De Man insists that the sphinx "himself is the inscription of a sign," "an emblem of forgetting," and therefore cannot be the productive voice of the poem--68-70

Useful: "Essentialism": a focus on the text's production and structure at the expense of its reception and impact. Favored by Benjamin, Adorno, Rainer Warning, not Jauss.

Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)