Suggestions for a Theory of Productive Reception: Hans Robert Jauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer through Dialogue

The receptive-aesthetic program has probably found resonance in Hans Robert Jauss' challenge for the contemporary study of literature and has addressed the core problems of aesthetics and literary hermeneutics and historiography. This fact, that is, the aesthetic experience and its specific relation to the literary-historical model, gives Jauss a certain point of view. In this perspective, the interest is focused on the question of how the dialogue between aesthetic experience and literary hermeneutics could prevail as an aesthetic norm and how literature should be understood in the historical horizon. A first task would be how Jauss, following Hans Georg Gadamer, orientates himself through the logic of question and answer and the dialogical relation of the present to the past, and how the present can be understood as a productive instance of the past. In view of this fact, however, Jauss reverses this relationship in Gadamer's sense and emphasizes the function of the present in the renewal of literary historiography, whereby the appropriation of the past belongs to the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). This resulted in the need to answer an urgent question. The fact that the articulation of dissatisfaction with existing literary historiography leads to a public mandate to portray the history of literary criticism as a reception history becomes, for Jauss, the subject of a reception and impact research.