Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Prof: So we arrive at our turn to sociogenesis.
Genesis is, of course, here obviously--even as we read
both Jauss and Bakhtin for today--a misleading term in a
certain sense; because obviously,
the most egregious difference between Jauss and Bakhtin--
and once again you're probably saying to yourself,
"Well, my goodness.
Why have these two texts been put together?"--
the most egregious difference is that Bakhtin's primary
concern is with the "life world"
that produces a text and Jauss' primary concern is with the
"life world," or perhaps better
"succession of life worlds,"
in which a text is received.
I think you can tell, however, from reading both
texts, and will be conscious as you go
through the materials that remain on the syllabus,
that the relationship between the production and reception of
literature, or of discourse of any kind,
once you factor in the social setting of such a text,
becomes much more permeable, much more fluid.
There's a certain sense in which the producer is the
receiver; in which the author is the
reader and stands in relation to a tradition, to a past,
as a reader; and the reader in turn,
in continuing to circulate texts through history--
that is to say, in playing a role as someone
who keeps texts current-- is perhaps even in concrete
terms a writer.
That is to say, he or she is someone who
expresses opinions, circulates values,
and keeps texts, as I say, in circulation.
I've always felt this about Jauss's sense of what a reader
is.
What kind of reader would it be who was responsible for the
continued presence, or influence,
of a text through literary history who wasn't in some sense
communicating an opinion?
This is obviously truer today than ever before when we have
blogs and discussion groups and when everybody is circulating
opinions on the internet.
Plainly the reader, plainly the taste-maker,
the reader as taste-maker, is at the same time a writer.
Just in passing--this has become a digression but I hope a
useful one-- in this context,
one can think about a really strange pairing,
Jauss in relation to Bloom.
If Bloom's theory of strong misreading as a principle of
literary historiography can be understood as a relationship
between writers as readers and readers as writers,
so by the same token if we see Jauss's analysis of reception in
these terms, and if we think of reception as
a necessary circulation of opinion,
there is, after all, a sense in which for Jauss,
too, the reader is a writer and the writer is a reader.
That is undoubtedly a remote connection,
but it is a way of seeing how both Bloom and Jauss are figures
who have strong and interesting and plausible theories about
literary history.
All right.
To go, however, back to the beginning--
back to the sense in which we're at a watershed,
or a moment of transition in this course,
leaving for the moment out of the picture the intermediate
step of psychogenesis-- to go back to this sense of our
being in a moment of transition--
as always, such is the calendar, just at the wrong
time: we finally accomplish our transition,
then we go off to spring break, forget everything we ever knew
and come back and start off once again as a tabula rasa.
We'll do our best to bridge that gap.
In any case, if we now find ourselves
understanding in reading these two texts for the first time,
really--although it's not that we haven't been talking about
"life" before.
Obviously, we have been, as it's not as though the
Russian formalists culminating in the structuralism of Jakobson
don't talk about a referential function.
It's unfair even to the New Critics to say that somehow the
world is excluded from the interpretative or reading
process-- even though all along we've
been saying things like this, we still sense a difference.
The difference is in the perceived relationship between
the text, the object of study,
and the life world-- the sense, in fact,
in which a text is a life world.
This has, after all, something to do with our
understanding of what language is.
So far we have been thinking of language as a semiotic code and
also with the strong suspicion that this semiotic code is a
virtual one.
We have been emphasizing the degree to which we are passive
in relation to, or even, as it were,
"spoken by" this language.
In other words, it's been a constant in our
thinking about these matters that language speaks through us,
but we have exercised so far a curious reticence about the
sense in which this language is not just a code,
not just something that exists virtually at a given historical
moment, but is in fact a code made up
of other people's language: in other words,
that it is language in circulation,
not just language as somehow abstractly outside of networks
of circulation available for use.
So we begin now to think of language still,
and the relationship between language and speech,
but now it's not a language abstracted from reality;
it's a language which, precisely, circulates
within reality and as a matter of social exchange and social
interaction.
Language is now and henceforth on our syllabus a social
institution.
In literary theory it has the same determinative relationship
with my individual speech, but we now begin to understand
the claim that I don't speak my own language in a different
register.
Hitherto it's been, well, "Language is there
before me, what I speak is just sort of
that which I borrow from it," but now this takes on
a new valency altogether.
What I don't speak is my language;
it's other people's language.
My voice--and the word "voice"
is obviously under heavy pressure here,
even though nobody says it goes away--
my voice is a voice permeated by all the sedimentations,
registers, levels, and orientations of language in
the world that surrounds me.
I take my language, in other words,
from other people.
I stand here--for my sins--lecturing in kind of an
ad-lib way, and that makes it even more pronounced in what I
say.
You're hearing the internet.
You're hearing newspaper headlines.
You're hearing slang.
You're hearing all sorts of locutions and rhetorical devices
that I'd be ashamed to call mine, >
at least in many cases, because they are in the world;
they are out there, as we say.
What's out there gets to the point where it's in here,
and the next thing you know, it becomes part of the ongoing
patter or blather of an individual.
It is, in other words, the speech of others that
you're hearing when you hear an individual.
The extent or the degree to which this might be the case is,
I suppose, always subject to debate.
We're going to take up a couple of examples,
but in any case, you can see that without the
structure of the relationship between language and speech
having really changed-- and in fact it won't really
change as we continue along-- without the structure of the
relationship between language and speech having changed,
the nature of this relationship and the way in which we think of
it in social terms is changed, and the social aspect of it now
comes into prominence and will remain there.
Now in order to see how this works in the case of today's two
authors a little more concretely,
I wanted to turn to a couple of passages on your sheet.
You got my grim warning last night that if you didn't bring
it, I wouldn't have any to circulate.
We'll see how well that worked, and if it didn't work,
well, perhaps it'll work better in the future.
In any case, first of all turning to the
first passage on the sheet by Bakhtin--
by the way, if you don't have the sheet,
maybe somebody near you does, or maybe somebody near you has
a computer which is being used for the correct purposes that
can be >
held somehow between the two of you.
These are all possibilities.
The first passage on the sheet by Bakhtin is about the
relationship between what he takes to be a formalist
understanding of double-voicedness--
for example, the new critical understanding
which he's not directly talking about but which we could use as
an example of irony-- the ways of talking about not
meaning what you say.
He's talking about those sorts of double-voicedness in
relationship to, in contradistinction to,
what he means by "genuine heteroglossia,"
and he says, first passage on the sheet:
Rhetoric is often limited to purely verbal victories over the
word, over ideological authority.
[In other words, I am sort of getting under your
ribs if you're somehow or another voicing an
authoritative, widespread, or tyrannical
opinion by some form or another of subverting it--
in other words, a kind of a binary relationship
between what I'm saying and what's commonly being said out
there.] When this happens [says
Bakhtin] rhetoric degenerates into
formalistic verbal play but, we repeat, when discourse is
torn from reality it is fatal for the word itself as well.
Words grow sickly, lose semantic depth and
flexibility, the capacity to expand and renew their meanings
in new living contexts.
They essentially die as discourse, for the signifying
word lives beyond itself; that is, it lives by directing
its purposiveness outward.
Double-voicedness, which is merely verbal,
is not structured on authentic heteroglossia but on a mere
diversity of voices.
In other words, it doesn't take into account
the way in which there are seepages or permeabilities among
the possibilities and registers of meaning,
depending on extraordinarily complex speaking communities
coming together in any aspect of discourse,
ways in which we have to think about the life world of a
discourse in order to understand the play of voice.
Heteroglossia is the language of others.
That's what it means if we are to to understand the way in
which the language of others is playing through and permeating
the text.
A comparable response to formalism on the part of Hans
Robert Jauss-- I should say in passing that
both Bakhtin and Jauss have authentic and close relations
with the Russian formalists.
Bakhtin begins, in a way, at the very end of
the formalist tradition, as a kind of second generation
formalist, but quickly moves away--it is
breaking up in the late 1920s-- from that and begins to rewrite
formalism in a certain sense as a sociogenesis of discourse in
language; and by the same token,
Jauss in his theory of literary history--
which is not enunciated in these terms in the text that you
have, but rather in the long text
from which I wish your editor had taken an excerpt,
called "Literary History as a Provocation to Literary
Theory."
You have excerpts from that on your sheet.
In any case, in Jauss' understanding of the
relationship between the text and the life world,
Jauss cobbles together, as it were,
aspects of Russian formalist historiography,
particularly that of Jakobson and Tynjanov,
and a Marxist understanding of, as it were,
the marketing, reception, and consumption of
literary production.
These pairs of ideas go together in his developing of
his thesis about literary reception, to which we'll return
at the end of the lecture.
The second passage on the sheet, which distances him,
in which he wants to distance himself somewhat from both of
these influences, goes as follows:
Early Marxist and formalist methods in common conceive the
literary fact within the closed circle of an aesthetics of
production and representation.
In doing so, they deprive literature of a
dimension that inalienably belongs to its aesthetic
character as well as to its social function,
the dimension of its reception and influence.
In other words, the way in which a text,
once it exists, moves in the world,
the way in which it persists, changes as we understand it and
grows or diminishes as time passes in the world:
this is the medium, the social medium,
in which Jauss wants to understand literary--
precisely literary--interpretation,
as we'll see.
Coming a little closer to this issue of the relationship
between thinking of this kind and the formalist tradition,
Bakhtin on page 592, the left-hand column toward the
bottom-- I'm not going to quote this,
I'm just going to say that it's there--
Bakhtin begins a sentence about, as he puts it,
literary "parody" understood in the narrow sense.
Now what he's implying here is that the theory of parody
belongs primarily to Russian formalist literary
historiography.
In other words, the relationship between a new
text and an old text is one of, broadly conceived within this
discourse, parody.
Bakhtin picks up the word "parody"
in order to say also on page 592, the left-hand column about
halfway down: … [A]
mere concern for language is [and it's an odd thing to say,
"a mere concern for language"
>
] but the abstract side of the
concrete and active [i.e., dialogically engaged]
understanding of the living heteroglossia that has been
introduced into the novel and artistically organized within
it.
To pause over this, "parody":
if we linger merely on the literariness of parody,
we simply don't have any grasp of the complexity of the ways in
which the dialogic or the heteroglossal modulates,
ripples, and makes complicated the surface of literary
discourse.
Parody once again leaves us with a sense of the binary:
the previous text was this, the secondary text or the next
text riffs off that previous text in a way that we can call
parodic-- but that's binary.
It's one text against another and leaves out the whole
question of that flood or multiplicity of voices which
pervades the text.
Okay.
So then Jauss has an interesting moment again,
in the fourth passage on your sheet,
in which he is obviously directly responding to that
passage at the end of Tynjanov's essay on literary evolution
which we've had on the board and which we've discussed before.
You remember Tynjanov makes the distinction between evolution--
the way in which a sequence of texts mutates,
as one might say, and the way in which,
in other words, successive texts (again) parody
or alter what was in the previous text--
and modification, which is the influence on texts
from the outside by other sorts of historical factors which may
lead to textual change.
Tynjanov says that it's important,
actually for both studies--for the study of history and also
for the study of literary history--
that the two be always kept clearly distinct in the mind of
the person looking at them.
Well, Jauss's response to that is perhaps chiefly rhetorical,
but it nevertheless once again does mark this shift in the
direction of the understanding of language as social that I've
been wanting to begin by emphasizing.
Jauss says: The connection between literary
evolution and social change [that is to say,
those features in society that would and do modify texts]
does not vanish from the face of the earth through its mere
negation.
What is he saying?
He's saying "does not vanish from the face of the
earth" because Tynjanov said it did.
>
There is no doubt that that's the passage Jauss is talking
about.] The new literary work [he goes
on] is received and judged against
the background of the everyday experience of life.
In other words, the work exists in a life
world.
There is no easy or even possible way of distinguishing
between its formal innovations and those sorts of innovations
which are produced by continuous and ongoing factors of social
change.
They interact.
They seep into one another in exactly the same way that all
the registers and sedimentations of human voices interact and
seep into one another in Bakhtin's heteroglossia.
All right.
So these then are the emphases of both of these writers with
respect to formalist ideas which have played a prominent part in
most, if not all, of the literary
theory that we have studied up until now.
I'd like to linger a little while with Bakhtin before
turning back to Jauss.
Now heteroglossia or diversity of speech,
as he calls it sometimes--he says at one point again on page
592 toward the top of the left-hand column--
heteroglossia is what he calls "the ground of style."
I want to pause to ask a little bit what he might mean by this
expression, "the ground of style," the italicized
passage.
It is precisely the diversity of speech and not the unity of a
normative shared language that is the ground of style.
In other words, I've already said,
of course, when I speak I'm not speaking to you in an official
voice.
I am not speaking the King's English.
In fact, on this view there's really no such thing as the
King's English.
Nobody speaks the King's English because there is no such
isolated distilled entity that one can point to.
Language, at least the language of most of us--
that is to say, of everyone except people in
hermetically sealed environments like,
for example, a peculiarly privileged,
inward-looking aristocracy--the language of virtually all of us
is the language of the people, the language of others.
It is that which we have to continue to think about as we
consider how a style is generated.
We speak of a style as though it were purely a question of an
authorial signature.
Sometimes we think of style and signature as synonymous.
"Oh, I would recognize that style anywhere."
Coleridge said of a few lines of Wordsworth,
"If I had come across these lines in the desert,
I'd have said 'Wordsworth.'"
Well, obviously there is a certain
sense in which we do recognize a style: for example,
the style of Jane Austen.
[Points to quotation on board.] I suppose arguably you could
think that this is the style of Dr.
Johnson, but most people would recognize
it as the style of Jane Austen; and yet at the same time,
as we'll see in a minute, it is a style made up,
in ways that are very difficult finally to factor out and
analyze, of many voices.
Okay.
So this would suggest, I think--this idea of a style
as a composite of speech sedimentations--
this idea would suggest that possibly there isn't a voice,
that to speak of an authorial voice would be a very difficult
matter and might lead us to ask, "Does this move the idea
that the sociolect speaks through the idiolect,
the idea that the language of everyone is,
in fact, the language that speaks my speech,
my peculiar individual speech--does this once again
bring us face to face with that dreary topic,
the death of the author?"
I don't think so, not quite, and certainly not in
Bakhtin, who gives us a rather bracing
sense of the importance of the author in a passage on page 593,
the right-hand column.
He says: It is as if the author [this
is, of course, sort of coming face-to-face
with the problem of whether there still is an author]
has no language of his own, but does possess his own style,
his own organic and unitary law governing the way he plays with
languages [so style is perhaps one's particular way of
mediating and allocating the diversity of voice that impinges
on what one's saying] and the way his own real
semantic and expressive intentions are refracted within
them.
[And here Bakhtin saves or preserves the author by invoking
the principle of unifying intention and the way in which
we can recognize it in the discourse of any given novel.]
Of course this play with languages (and frequently the
complete absence of a direct discourse of his own) in no
sense degrades the general, deep-seated intentionality,
the overarching ideological conceptualization of the work as
a whole.
So this is not, though it may seem to be in
certain respects, a question of the death of the
author as provoked by, let's say, Foucault or Roland
Barthes at the beginning of the semester.
It's not that exactly.
Everything that we've been saying so far can be seen to
work in a variety of novels.
The novel is the privileged genre for Bakhtin.
He, I think perhaps somewhat oversimplifying in this,
reads the novel, the emergence of the novel,
and the flowering and richness of the novel against the
backdrop of genres he considers to be monoglossal:
the epic, which simply speaks the unitary
voice of an aristocratic tradition;
the lyric, which simply speaks the unitary voice of the
isolated romantic solipsist.
Over against that, you get the polyglossal,
the rich multiplicity of voice in the novel.
As I say, I think that the generic contrast is somewhat
oversimplified because nothing is easier and more profitable
than to read both epic and lyric as manifestations of
heteroglossia.
Just think of The Iliad.
What are you going to do, if you really believe that it's
monoglossal, with the speeches of Thersites?
Okay.
In any case, the basic idea,
however, is I think extraordinarily rich
and important, and I thought we could try it
out by taking a look for a moment at the first sentence of
Pride and Prejudice, which I'm sure most of you
know [gestures to board,
It is plainly an example of the relationship between what
Bakhtin calls "common language"--
"It is a truth universally acknowledged,"
or in other >
words, it's in everybody's mouth--and something like
authorial reflection, or what he elsewhere calls
"internally persuasive discourse."
Now in traditional parlance, this would be a speech which
manifests irony, the rhetoric of irony against
which Bakhtin sets himself in the first passage on your sheet.
"How ridiculous!"
we say.
Jane Austen doesn't believe this.
This is drawing-room wisdom, and everything in her sentence
points to the ways in which it's obviously wrong,
even while it's being called a truth: "universally"
meaning the thousand people or so who matter;
in other words, >
there are a great many people who neither acknowledge nor care
about any such thing.
Then, of course, the idea that "a single
man in possession of a good fortune,"
or indeed otherwise, has nothing to do but be
"in want of a wife."
Obviously, this is what is being said not by the man in the
street but by drawing-room culture.
Now even before we turn to the complication of the ways in
which the sentence is being undermined,
bear in mind that the plot of the novel confirms the
"truth."
In other words, Darcy and Bingley,
both of them "in possession of a good
fortune," do turn out very plainly to
have been in want of a wife and, in fact, procure one by the end
of the novel.
That is precisely what the plot is about,
so that the conventions governing the plot of Pride
and Prejudice altogether confirm the truth that is
announced in this sentence, even though it is a
truth that is plainly to be viewed ironically.
That in itself is quite extraordinary and,
I think, reinforces our sense that this is one of the great
first sentences in the history of fiction.
Let's turn now to the way in which we can think of it as
something other than a simple irony.
Of course, there is this word "want."
We've been thinking a lot about want lately because we have just
gone through our psychoanalytic phase.
What exactly does this >
single man really want?
In a way, the subtle pun in the word "want,"
which means both "to desire" and "to
lack"-- well, if I lack something,
I don't necessarily desire it.
I just don't happen to have it, right?
On the other hand, if I want something,
I can also be said to desire it.
Well, which is it?
Is it a kind of lack that social pressure of some sort is
calculated to fill, or is it desire?
If it's desire, what on earth does it have to
do with a good fortune?
There are elements of the romance plot which raise
precisely that question.
Desire has nothing to do with fortune.
Convenience, social acceptability,
comfort: all of those things have to do with fortune,
but desire, we suppose--having passed through our
psychoanalytic phase-- to be of a somewhat different
nature.
The complication of the sentence has to do actually with
the question of the way in which the meanings of these words can
be thought to be circulating and to create ripples of irony of
their own far more complicated than "Oh,
the author's much smarter than that,
she doesn't mean that," which is already a complication
introduced by the fact that her plot bears it out.
How can her plot bear it out if she's being so ironic?
Of course, there is obviously a good deal more to say.
A single man in possession of a good fortune obviously may not
at all want a wife, for a variety of reasons that
one could mention, and that can't be possibly
completely absent from Jane Austen's mind.
So that has to be taken into account in itself and certainly
does [lights go off in lecture hall]--
I think you see it's the sort of sentence that bears
reflection beyond a kind of simple binary of the sentence as
spoken by the man in the drawing room,
or the woman in the drawing room.
"It's idiotic, it's obviously wrong--
we simply can't say that": the style of the author is a
style that is sedimented by and through complexities of
circulated meaning that really can't be limited by any sense of
one-to-one relation of that kind.
>
All right.
What else about Bakhtin?
One more thing: His idea of common language.
This is not a concept that is supposed to have any one
particular value attached to it.
It's a little bit like the rhizome.
It could be good; it could be bad.
Common language could be a kind of Rabelaisan,
carnivalesque, subversive, energetic body of
voices from below overturning the apple carts of authority and
the fixed ways of a moribund social order.
It could be that, but at the same time it could
itself be the authoritative, the reactionary,
the mindless.
Common language could be that universality of acknowledgement
which seems to go along with unreflected,
knee-jerk responses to what one observes and thinks about.
Common language has that whole range.
The important thing about it is that it's out there and that it
circulates and it exists in relationship with what Bakhtin
calls "internally persuasive discourse"--
in other words, the way in which the filtering
together of these various sorts of language result in something
like what we feel to be authentic:
a power of reflection, a posing of relations among the
various strata of language, such that they can speak
authentically, not necessarily in a way that
we agree with but in a way that we recognize to constitute that
distilled consciousness that we still do call "the
author," and to which we ascribe,
in some sense, authority.
Precisely in the peculiar self-mocking relationship
between this sentence of Pride and Prejudice and
the plot of Pride and Prejudice as a whole,
we feel something like the internal persuasiveness,
the coherence of the discourse.
I think, maybe just to sum up Bakhtin,
I want to quote you from the other long excerpt that you have
in your anthology, which I would encourage you to
read.
Sometimes I have asked people to read it but I decided to drop
it this year--but it's still a very strong and interesting
argument.
It's called "Discourse in the Novel,"
and I just want to read in the left-hand column,
near the bottom of the column: "The ideological becoming
of a human being in this view is the process of selectively
assimilating the words of others."
In other words, the coherence of my mind,
of what I say insofar as coherence exists,
is the result of selecting out, of selecting among,
in my assimilation of the words of others,
such that there is a pattern of, again, coherence.
All right.
So finally, the novel is the social text par
excellence for Bakhtin for these reasons,
and it confirms again what we have been saying about a new way
of thinking of language.
Language, as that which speaks through us, is not just
language; it's other people's language,
and we need to understand the experience of the process of
reading and of texts as they exist and the nature of
authorial composition as an assimilative,
selective way of putting together other people's
language.
All right.
Now quickly Jauss.
He takes us back, obviously by way of Iser--
I think you can see that Jauss's talk about horizons of
expectation and the disruption of expectation has a great deal
to do with Iser's understanding of the role of the reader in
filling imaginative gaps that are left in the text,
which are based on a complex relationship with a set of
conventional expectations-- by way of Iser to Gadamer;
because after all, what Jauss has to say is a way
of talking about Gadamer's "merger of horizons."
But for Jauss it's not just my horizon and the horizon of the
text.
It's not just those two horizons that need to meet
halfway on common ground as mutually illuminative.
It is, in fact, a succession of horizons
changing as modes of aesthetic and interpretive response to
texts are mediated historically--
as I say--in a sequence.
It's not just that the text was once a certain thing and now we
feel it to be somehow different, hence in order to understand it
we need to meet it halfway.
It's rather a matter of self-consciously studying what
has happened in between that other time and this,
here and now.
The text has had a life.
It has passed through life changes,
and these life changes have to be understood at each successive
stage in terms of the three moments of hermeneutic grasp,
as described by Gadamer in the historical section of Truth
and Method.
The distinction between intelligere,
explicare, and applicare--
understanding, interpretation,
and application-- that Jauss talks about at the
beginning of his essay actually goes back to the eighteenth
century.
What Jauss has to say about it is,
yes: these three moments of hermeneutic understanding exist
for any reader or reading public at any moment in the history of
the reception of a text.
He makes a considerable to-do about distinguishing between the
aesthetic response to the text and a subsequent or leisured,
reflectively interpretive response to the text.
This may seem a little confusing because he admits with
Heidegger and others, as we've indicated ourselves in
the past, that you can't just have a
spontaneous response to anything without reflection.
There's always a sense in which you already know what it is,
which is to say a sense in which you've already interpreted
it; but at the same time,
Jauss makes a considerable point of distinguishing between
these two moments-- the aesthetic,
which he associates with understanding,
and the interpretive, which he associates with what
is in the hermeneutic tradition called interpretation.
Now why does he do this?
It's a question of what he means by "the
aesthetic."
A text enters historical circulation and remains before
the gaze of successive audiences in history because it has been
received aesthetically.
Aesthetics is the glue that keeps the text alive through
history.
In other words, people continue to say,
to one degree or another, "I like it."
If they don't say, "I like it,"
there will never be a question of interpreting it
>
or transmitting it historically,
because it's going to disappear.
As Dr.
Johnson said, "That book is good in vain
which the reader throws away."
In other words, from the standpoint of
interpretation or from the standpoint of philosophical
reflection or whatever you might wish to call it,
a book may be good, just incontestably good--
but if it didn't please, if it didn't give pleasure,
if it didn't attach itself to a reading public aesthetically by
means of pleasing, none of what would follow in
the hermeneutic process could ever take place.
So that's why Jauss makes such a point of distinguishing
between the aesthetic and the interpretive.
Then of course the historical study of reception is what shows
us the degree to which any set of moments of aesthetic and
interpretive reception is mediated by what has gone before
it.
In other words, a text gradually changes as a
result of its reception, and if we don't study
reception, we are left naively supposing that time has passed
and that the past has become sort of remote from us so we
have certain problems interpreting;
but these problems as far as we know haven't arisen from
anything that could properly be called change.
There has been an unfolding process of successive
interpretations whereby a text has gone through sea changes:
it's become less popular, more popular,
more richly interpreted and less richly interpreted,
but tends to keep eddying out from what it was sensed to be
originally, to the point where all sorts of
accretive implications and sources of pleasure may arrive
as we understand it.
In a certain sense, once again it's like
"Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote," but now it's not just Pierre
Menard and Miguel de Cervantes.
It's as though a succession of people,
perhaps whose native language was not French necessarily but
who knows-- German, Russian,
whatever--continued to write in Spanish a text which turns out
to be word-for-word Don Quixote as the centuries
pass, each one acquiring a whole new
world of associations and implications and giving pleasure
in successively new ways.
When we finally get to the point in the late nineteenth
century, when we encounter this
Frenchman, Pierre Menard, writing Don Quixote,
the important thing would be to understand that lots of
people have done it between him and Cervantes.
This is a kind of skeletal model of how a reception history
according to Jauss might work.
Now the history of reception studies two things.
It studies changing horizons of expectation,
and that's something you're familiar with from Iser--
that is to say, the way in which a reader has
to come to terms with conventions surrounding
expectation in any given text, in order to be able to
negotiate what's new and what's nearly merely culinary in the
text-- it involves changing horizons
of expectations which don't just change once in the here and now,
but have changed successively through time.
It also involves changing semantic possibilities or,
if you will, changing possibilities for and
of significance-- what does the text mean for me
now?-- but understood again not just
as something that matters for me,
but has successively mattered for successive generations of
readers in between.
Just to take examples of how this might work in the here and
now, there is just now on Broadway a
revival of Damn Yankees, which is about a baseball
player who sells his soul in order to beat the Yankees.
One can't help but think that the revival of interest in
Damn Yankees has something to do with the steroid
scandals and the way in which so many baseball players do sell
their souls in order to win and in order to have good careers.
It occurs to one that it is in this sort of atmosphere of
social and cultural censure that we're suddenly interested in
Damn Yankees again.
Perhaps there will be a revival of Tony the Tow Truck
because in the economic downturn,
obviously to be rich or to be glamorous like Neato or to be
busy like Speedy-- all of this becomes obsolete,
more or less irrelevant and beside the point,
and what really matters is little guys helping each other.
So Tony the Tow Truck could be revived today as a
parable of the good life in the downturn,
and so it will probably be read by everyone,
it will give pleasure, it will therefore be
interpreted, and it will survive to live
another day historically, fulfilling the three moments of
the study of the history of reception required by Jauss.
All right.
So with that said, it's been a very interesting
fifty minutes I think.
>
With that said, I hope you all have a good
break and we'll see you when you get back.