New Directions in Literary History

Ralph Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000513011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

First published in 1974, New Directions in Literary History is a comprehensive attempt to present approaches to literary studies that have developed from phenomenology, stylistics and linguistics, Marxist reconsiderations of literature, interdisciplinary studies and analysis of reader response. Written by an international group of scholars, the essays are taken from the pages of New Literary History. They range from the Middle Ages to contemporary literature.

European and American literary critics are here represented, together with an art critic, a philosopher and a novelist. Their essays deal with crucial problems in the study of literature: the relationship of the contemporary critic to works of the past; the place of method in literary study; how reading takes place; the role of the reader in different literary periods in providing a guide to interpretation; the language of literature and its relation to natural or ordinary language; the origin and decline of literary forms; and what constitutes literature, especially in the relation between fictional character and autobiography. Although the essays are essentially concerned with theoretical issues, they also examine the practical applications to literature. Students of English literature and literary theory will find this book particularly interesting.

1 Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory*

Hans Robert Jauss

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247937-2

* This essay is a translation of chapters V — XII of Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft, Konstanz, 1967; it forms part of a later published collection of essays, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Frankfurt, 1970 (edition suhrkamp, 418).

LITERARY history may be seen as challenging literary theory to take up once again the unresolved dispute between the Marxist and formalist schools. My attempt to bridge the gap between literature and history, between historical and aesthetic approaches, begins at the point at which both schools stop. Their methods understand the literary fact in terms of the circular aesthetic system of production and of representation. In doing so, they deprive literature of a dimension which unalterably belongs to its aesthetic character as well as to its social function: its reception and impact. Reader, listener and spectator—in short, the audience—play an extremely limited role in both literary theories. Orthodox Marxist aesthetics treats the reader— if at all—the same way as it does the author; it inquires about his social position or describes his place within the structure of the society. The formalist school needs the reader only as a perceiving subject who follows the directions in the text in order to perceive its form or discover its techniques of procedure. It assumes that the reader has the theoretical knowledge of a philologist sufficiently versed in the tools of literature to be able to reflect on them. The Marxist school, on the other hand, actually equates the spontaneous experience of the reader with the scholarly interest of historical materialism, which seeks to discover relationships between the economic basis of production and the literary work as part of the intellectual superstructure. However, as Walther Bulst has stated, “no text was ever written to be read and interpreted philologically by philologists,” ¹ nor, may I add, historically by historians. Neither approach recognizes the true role of the reader to whom the literary work is primarily addressed, a role as unalterable for aesthetic as for historical appreciation.

1 “Bedenken eines Philologen,” Stadium générale, VII (1954), 321–23. The new approach to literary tradition which R. Guiette has sought in a series of pioneering essays (partly in Questions de littérature [Gent, 1960] ), using his own original methods of combining aesthetic criticism with understanding of history, follows his (unpublished) axiom, “The greatest error of philologists is to believe that literature has been written for philologists.” See also his “Eloge de la lecture,” Revue générale belge (January, 1966), pp. 3-14.

For the critic who judges a new work, the writer who conceives of his work in light of positive or negative norms of an earlier work and the literary historian who classifies a work in his tradition and explains it historically are also readers before their reflexive relationship to literature can become productive again. In the triangle of author, work and reading public the latter is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but even history-making energy. The historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of its audience. For it is only through the process of its communication that the work reaches the changing horizon of experience in a continuity in which the continual change occurs from simple reception to critical understanding, from passive to active reception, from recognized aesthetic norms to a new production which surpasses them. The historicity of literature as well as its communicative character presupposes a relation of work, audience and new work which takes the form of a dialogue as well as a process, and which can be understood in the relationship of message and receiver as well as in the relationship of question and answer, problem and solution. The circular system of production and of representation within which the methodology of literary criticism has mainly moved in the past must therefore be widened to include an aesthetics of reception and impact if the problem of understanding the historical sequence of literary works as a continuity of literary history is to find a new solution.

The perspective of the aesthetics of reception mediates between passive reception and active understanding, norm-setting experience and new production. If the history of literature is viewed in this way as a dialogue between work and public, the contrast between its aesthetic and its historical aspects is also continually mediated. Thus the thread from the past appearance to the present experience of a work, which historicism had cut, is tied together.

The relationship of literature and reader has aesthetic as well as historical implications. The aesthetic implication is seen in the fact that the first reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works which he has already read.² The obvious historical implication of this is that the appreciation of the first reader will be continued and enriched through further “receptions” from generation to generation; in this way the historical significance of a work will be determined and its aesthetic value revealed. In this process of the history of reception, which the literary historian can only escape at the price of ignoring his own principles of comprehension and judgment, the repossession of past works occurs simultaneously with the continual mediation of past and present art and of traditional evaluation and current literary attempts. The merit of a literary history based on an aesthetics of reception will depend upon the degree to which it can take an active part in the continual integration of past art by aesthetic experience. This demands on the one hand—in opposition to the objectivism of positivist literary history—a conscious attempt to establish canons, which, on the other hand—in opposition to the classicism of the study of traditions—presupposes a critical review if not destruction of the traditional literary canon. The criterion for establishing such a canon and the ever necessary retelling of literary history is clearly set out by the aesthetics of reception. The step from the history of the reception of the individual work to the history of literature has to lead us to see and in turn to present the historical sequence of works in the way in which they determine and clarify our present literary experience.³

2 This thesis is one of the main points of the Introduction à une esthétique de la littérature by G. Picon (Paris, 1953), see esp. pp. 90 ff. 3 W. Benjamin (1931) formulated a corresponding idea: “For it is not a question of showing the written works in relation to their time but of presenting the time which knows them—that is our time—in the time when they originated. Thus literature becomes an organon of history and the task of literary history is to make it this—and not to make it the material of history” (Angelus Novus, Frankfurt, 1966, p. 456).

Literary history can be rewritten on this premise, and the following remarks suggest seven theses that provide a systematic approach to such rewriting.

I

If literary history is to be rejuvenated, the prejudices of historical objectivism must be removed and the traditional approach to literature must be replaced by an aesthetics of reception and impact. The historical relevance of literature is not based on an organization of literary works which is established post factum but on the reader’s past experience of the “literary data.” This relationship creates a dialogue that is the first condition for a literary history. For the literary historian must first become a reader again himself before he can understand and classify a work; in other words, before he can justify his own evaluation in light of his present position in the historical progression of readers.

R. G. Collingwood’s criticism of the prevailing ideology of objectivity in history—”History is nothing but the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s mind”⁴—is even more valid for literary history. For the positivistic view of history as the “objective” description of a series of events in an isolated past neglects the artistic quality as well as the specific historical relevance of literature. A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period.⁵ It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time: “words which must, at the same time that they speak to him, create an interlocutor capable of listening.”⁶ A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue, and philological scholarship has to be founded on a continuous re-reading of texts, not on mere facts.⁷ Philological scholarship is continuously dependent upon interpretation, which must have as its goal, along with learning about the object, the reflection upon and description of the perfection of this knowledge as an impulse to new understanding.

4 The Idea of History (New York and Oxford, 1956), p. 228. 5 Here I am following A. Nisin in his criticism of the latent Platonism of philological methods, that is, of their belief in the timeless nature of a literary work and in a timeless point of view of the reader: “For the work of art, if it cannot incarnate the essence of art, is no longer an object which we can regard according to the Cartesian rule ‘without putting anything of ourselves into it but what can apply indiscriminately to all objects,’ “ La Littérature et le lecteur (Paris, 1959), p. 57 (see also my critique in Archiv fiir das Studium der neueren Sprachen, CXCVII [1960], 223-25). 6 Picon, Introduction, p. 34. This view of the dialogue-like nature of a literary work of art is found in Malraux (Les vois du silence) as well as in Picon, Nisin, and Guiette—a tradition of literary aesthetics which is still alive in France and to which I am especially indebted; it finally goes back to a famous sentence in Valéry’s poetics, “C’est l’exécution du poème qui est le poème.” 7 P. Szondi, “Uber philologische Erkenntnis,” Hölderlin-Studien (Frankfurt, 1967), rightly sees in this the decisive difference between literary and historical scholarship, p. 11: “No commentary, no criticism of the style of a poem should aim to give a description of the poem which one could gain by oneself. Even the least critical reader will want to confront it with the poem and will not understand it until he has traced the course of the argument back to the original idea upon which it was based.” Guiette says something very similar in “$loge de la lecture” (see note 1) .

History of literature is a process of aesthetic reception and production which takes place in realization of literary texts on the part of the receptive reader, the reflective critic and the author in his continued creativity. The continuously growing “literary data” which appear in the conventional literary histories are merely left over from this process; they are only the collected and classified past and therefore not history at all, but pseudohistory. Anyone who considers such literary data as history confuses the eventful character of a work of art with that of historical matter-of-factness. Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, a literary event, is not historical in the same sense as the Third Crusade, which was occurring at the same time.⁸ It is not a “fact” which could be explained as caused by a series of situational preconditions and motives, by the intent of an historical action as it can be reconstructed, and by the necessary and secondary results of this deed as an eventful turning point. The historical context in which a literary work appears is not a factual, independent series of events which exists apart from the reader. Perceval becomes a literary event only for the reader who reads this last work of Chrétien in light of his earlier works and who recognizes its individuality in comparison with these and other works which he has already read, so that he gains a new criterion for evaluating works. In contrast to a political event, a literary event has no lasting results which succeeding generations cannot avoid. It can continue to have an effect only if future generations still respond to it or rediscover it—if there are readers who take up the work of the past again or authors who want to imitate, outdo, or refute it. The organization of literature according to events is primarily integrated in the artistic standards of contemporary and succeeding readers, critics, and authors. Whether it is possible to comprehend and present the history of literature in its specific historicity depends on whether these standards can be objectified.

8 Note also J. Storost, “Das Problem der Literaturgeschichte,” Dante-Jahrbuch, XXXVIII (1960), 1-17, who simply equates the historical event with the literary event (”A work of art is first of all an artistic achievement and hence historical like the Battle of Isos”) .

II

The analysis of the literary experience of the reader avoids the threatening pitfalls of psychology if it describes the response and the impact of a work within the definable frame of reference of the reader’s expectations: this frame of reference for each work develops in the historical moment of its appearance from a previous understanding of the genre, from the form and themes of already familiar works, and from the contrast between poetic and practical language.

My thesis is opposed to a widespread skepticism that doubts that an analysis of the aesthetic impact can approach the meaning of a work of art or can produce at best more ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory
• 2 Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary History
• 3 Some Observations on Method in Literary Studies
• 4 The Life and Death of Literary Forms
• 5 History-Writing as Answerable Style
• 6 History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension
• 7 The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach
• 8 The Stylistic Approach to Literary History
• 9 Poetry as Fiction
• 10 The Limits of Literature
• 11 Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History
• 12 Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography
• 13 Dreaming with Adam: Notes on Imaginary History