Horizon of Expectation:Hans Robbert Jauss

BIOGRAPHY
Hans Robbert Jauss

Jauss was born in Göppingen, Württemberg, Germany, and died on 1 March 1997 in Constance, Germany. His family came from a long line of teachers. His religious background was pietism. As a young soldier in the Second World War, Jauss spent two winters on the Russian Front in the SS (SS-Nr. 401.359) and the Waffen-SS. In 1942, he was a member of the "SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Niederlande". In 1943, he was Obersturmführer in the "11th SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Nordland". In 1944, he was Hauptsturmführer in the SS reserve. Subsequently, he was part of the "33rd Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne".
In 1944, he was studies first semester in Prague. In November 1948 at Heidelberg, the twenty-seven year old Jauss, after post-war imprisonment, began studies in Romance Philology, Philosophy, History and Germanistik (history and culture of the Germanic peoples). Teachers at that time who made an impact on his thought included Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer. He was to remain there until 1954. In these years he made study trips to Paris and Perugia.
The themes of past and the present, time and remembrance, were already engaging Jauss’s research from the time of his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1952. His dissertation, under the direction of Gerhard Hess, was entitled Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts «À la recherche du temps perdu».
In 1957, with the treatise Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung, he obtained his habilitation for Romance Philology at the University of Heidelberg.
In 1959, Jauss took up his first teaching appointment as associate professor and director of the Romance Seminar at the University of Münster, Westfalen. In 1961, he moved to the University of Gießen, where, as full professor, he helped in the restructuring of the Romance Seminar.
It was in these years (1959-1962) that Jauss, along with Erich Köhler, founded a series of medieval texts entitled Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Outline of Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages). In 1963, he also played a prominent role in establishing the research group "Poetik und Hermeneutik" with two other colleagues from Gießen (Hans Blumenberg and Clemens Heselhaus), along with Wolfgang Iser from Würzburg.
The year 1966 saw the founding of the University of Constance as part of the reform of the German university system taking place at that time. Jauss was invited by his former teacher Gerhard Hess to join the staff. Doing away with previous autonomous institutes, the new university at Constance was set up with a cooperative and cross-disciplinary structure of "Units of Teaching and Research," following the Humbold principle of developing teaching out of research. Working on numerous committees, Jauss was particularly involved with setting up the "subject area" (Fachbereiche) of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft), an innovative structure at the time but soon to be emulated throughout Germany. Five professors, surrendering the privileges of departmental chairmanship in their different language fields, organised themselves into a research group that soon became known internationally as "The Constance School": Wolfgang Iser (English), Wolfgang Preisendanz (German), Manfred Fuhrmann (Latin), Hans Robert Jauss (Romance), and Jurij Striedter (Slavic). Jauss’s own inaugural lecture in 1967, entitled "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory", was dramatic and programmatic in its call for a new approach to literary studies. The ensuing years saw an application and development of that program, at times in vigorous debate with a diversity of dialogue partners.
Throughout his career, he was guest professor at the University of Zürich (winter semester 1967/68); at the Freie Universität Berlin (winter semester 1968/69); at Columbia University, New York (Fall 1973); at Yale University, New Haven (Spring 1976; turning down an offer to go there again in 1977); at the Sorbonne (Paris IV, winter semester, 1978); at the University of Leuven (Franqui-Professur, 1982); at the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 1982); at the University of California (1985); at Princeton University (Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow, February 1986); and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Brittingham Visiting Professor of English, March 1986).


Horizon of Expectation

New paradigm of literary criticism pays attention to the function of the reader in a
process of literary experience. Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), one of the main contributors to Reception Theory, published an essay, “The Change in the Paradigm of Literary Scholarship” in 1969. In this essay, Jauss points out the rise of the new paradigm and emphasizes the importance of interpretation by the reader, replacing the obsolete literary scholarship methodology which involved the studies of accumulated facts. Jauss’s theory views literature “from the perspective of the reader or consumer” and treats literature “as a dialectical process of production and reception.” In his article “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” (1969),

Jauss states the following:
…the relationship of work to work must now be brought into this interaction between work and mankind, and the historical coherence of works among themselves must be seen in the interrelations of production and reception. Put another way: literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public.( toward Aesthetic of Reception)

Jauss also made a new theory of literary paradigm (Horizon and Expectation). In this theory he tries to describe how come the old paradigm changed by the new paradigm, he uses scientific concept and oriented assumption in period.
In this theory he tries to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism which ignores history and social theories which ignore the text. Holub argues that the term horizon of expectations refers “to an intersubjective system or structure of expectations, a system of references or a mind-set that a hypothetical individual might bring to any text.” Jauss explains how the horizon of expectations is constructed in the

text:
A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, bring the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text. ( Jauss )

Actually Jauss was writing during a period of social unrest the end of 1960’s, then he and the others wanted to question the old canon of German literature and to show that it was perfectly reasonable to do so.
According to Holub, Jauss makes a connection between literary and general history; this is considered to be an important contribution to literary theory. Jauss argues that the task of literary history is “completed when literary production is not only represented synchronically and diachronically in the succession of its systems, but also seen as ‘special history’ in its own unique relationship to ‘general history.’” Jauss explains that the horizon of expectations is formed through the reader’s life experience, customs and understanding of the world, which have an effect on the reader’s social behavior. In this sense, the notion of history becomes fundamental to the horizon of expectations, and this is what differentiates Jauss’ approach to Reception Theory from one of Iser. Jauss also points out that the horizon of expectations is a crucial element in connecting literature and society. Jauss argues, “The social function of literature manifests itself in its genuine possibility only where the literary experience of the reader enters into the horizon of expectation…”

Inventing Australia

1. Any attempts or works to create an integrated view of Australia
as a nation by showing or claiming any special characteristics that
other countris do not have

2. Any attempts or efforts to create a national identity
National Identity :
1. the depiction of a countryas a whole, encompasing its culture, traditions, languagean politics
2. an invention - many complex elements in it

3 factors shaping
A. Modern Western ideas(science, nature,race,society, nationality)
B. Intellegentsia(Writers, artists, journalists, historians, critics)
C. The Economic Powerful

Bohemians [boh-hee-mee-uhn]
. The term "Bohemian" as related to Bohemianism. As the untraditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities – emerged in France in the early 19th century.
. A descriptive term for a stereotypical way of life for artists and intellectuals. According to the stereotype, bohemians live in material poverty because they prefer their art or their learning to lesser goods; they are also unconventional in habits and dress, and sometimes in morals.

How Bohemians Lived
1. They rejected private property and materialism by having no permanent residence anywhere and by surviving on little material wealth.
2. They rejected hard moral values by living carefree lives of alcohol and drug use, as well as open sexual freedom.
3. They rejected the pursuit of wealth by living solely for art and literature's sake, pursuing their passions regardless of whether they gained an income, which they usually did not.

Australia's Bohemian Tradition
- Australia has a long bohemian tradition beginning with Marcus Clarke in the 1860s.
- In 1960s the cities have spawned networks of poets, painters, novelists, journalists, actors, film makers, essayists as famous for their controversial, eccentric lifestyles as for the work they produced.
- In Australia bohemians be important because many of the people who lay claim to this label have been in the forefront of aesthetic or intellectual influence.
- In the 1890s, 1940s and the late 1960s' bohemianism was the chosen identity of Australian cultural revolutionaries.

Factors bringing Bohemianism
1. Local manufacturing industry grew very fast in Australia.
2. There were a lot of impact of economy movement on the world of art and literature.

The Bush
# A group of people living outside of the major metropolitan areas, mining agricultural areas & special landscape that is only exist in Australia.
# A wooded area, intermediate between a shrubland and a forest, generally of dry and nitrogen-poor soil, mostly grassless, thin to thick woody shrubs and bushes, under a sparse canopy of eucalypts.

Characteristics of Bushman
MATESHIP
STOICISM
MASCULINITY
XENOPHOBIA
ANTI GLOBALIZATION
RACISM

Australian Way of Life
A. Come to surface because of professional revolt
B. Sophisticated, urban, to destrialised, consumer society, egalitarianism,classlessness
C. Close relationship with manufacturing lifestyle.
So it creates urban and consumens

New Images of Australia
a. Assimilation ------- Integration
b.Australia recognizes of multi culturalism
c. Pluralistics, Multicultural Society
d. However, this does not change the position of Aborigin and migrants
(Still in the lower rumps of the socio economic ladder )
e. New Nationalism