reception
reception‘Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user … between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive’ (Roland Barthes). ‘Reception’, in the specialized sense used within literary theory, is a concept of German origin, associated primarily with the Constance school of critics led by H. R. Jauss and W. Iser, and is often now used to replace words like tradition, heritage, influence, etc., each key-word having its own implied agenda. Studies of reception-history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) are studies of the reading, interpretation, (re)fashioning, appropriation, use, and abuse of past texts over the centuries, reception-theory the theory underpinning such studies. Jauss starts from the proposition, previously advanced within German hermeneutics, e.g. in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and...
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