Reception Theory: My Own Intro

The marvelous introduction to Swartz' Reading Tao Yuanming comes with footnotes that outline a basic reading list in reception theory and its application to Chinese literature. Two fundamental texts include:

Boris Tomashevsky, »Literature and biography» [orig. »Literatura i biografija», Kniga i revoljucija, 4 (1923), 6–9], in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, MIT Press: Ann Arbor 1978, 47-55.

Tomashevsky calls for not becoming overly interested in the life of a writer. All written texts are in part self-portraits, perhaps, but novels and such things shouldn't all be interpreted biographically, at least not in some simple way. Readers are dumb, says Tomashevsky. Or at least, terribly escapist: "Readers demanded the complete illusion of life." But besides enjoying the pretty, readers need to appreciate the craftsmanship behind the work. The jump cuts, the weaving, the fact that something is being manipulated here.

Thus the biography that is useful to the literary historian is not the author’s curriculum vitae or the investigator’s account of his life. What the literary historian really needs is the biographical legend created by the author himself. Only such a legend is a literary fact.

I need to look a bit further before I'm clear on what a 'literary fact' is and is useful for. Clearly what is at stake here is historical in nature; part of Tomashevky's call is for us to remember when the artist was not so stronly identified with his work (the paintings of Rembrandt, for example, when they first came out) and to remember the specific conditions of the cultural context when artists did begin to create such legends about themselves (Pushkin and Voltaire are the examples here.) It's also not clear to me whether Tomashevsky actually liked memoirs, “memoir literature – memoirs transformed into artistic structures.” I don't know whether he thought they were poison to historical knowledge, relics only of artistic craft, not accurate representations of their times.


Jauss, Hans Robert "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans.
Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. 3-45.


For the moment, I'm looking at the 1970 New Literary History version of this essay which is now available online from JSTOR. Looking back at Tomashevksy, it is clear that part of his achievement was to understand how to take the perspective of readers. "Readers demande the complete illusion of life." Jauss takes this reader's perspective as something to analyze, which he does in a set of theses that end on a profound reading of the obscenity trial for Madame Bovary, which demonstrates vividly how the reader's "horizon of expectations" is bound to change over time. Theses 1-3 define this idea of a "horizon of expectations" and how to reconstruct it using criticism and popular opinion as evidence of the reader's perspective. Thesis 4 allows that this is a historical project, one that "avoids the recourse to a general spirit of the age" and instead puts the literary work in sequence as the product of the works that came before it, as well the receptions of those works. Theses 5 and 6 imagine the ways that understanding the structure of readership is useful to analyze the current literary scene.

It's finally clear to me that this method that Jauss outlines is a crucial one for just the type of literary study I have proposed: it is one that requires the scholar to imagine the readership, its changes over time, and also the connections between the readerships "horizon of expections" and the larger political and social values of the day.

Coming up: Applications of reception theory to Chinese literature.