b.
(2) Nowadays: a. It is maintained in requirements for examinations by the state system of examinations. b. It has almost disappeared in Germany. c. Only can find on the bookshelves of the educated bourgeoisies (who for the most part opens them, lacking a more appropriate literary dictionary to answer literary quiz questions) d. In university course catalogs literary history is clearly disappearing.
(2) Jauss’s famous views: 1.He differs from Iser: a. His theory is more hermeneutic in nature b. He emphasizes more on the interpretation of textual meaning
Literature History as a Challenge to Literary Theory (Hans Rober Jauss, 1921---)
1.The brief introduction of Hans Robert Jauss 2.The decline of literature history 3.Two ways of arranging the literature history 4.What is literature history? 5.A renewal of literary history.
2.The decline of literature history
(1)Before: a. To write the history of a national literature counted in the time of Gervinus and Scherer. The patriarchs regard representing in the history of literary works the idea of national individuality as their highest goal.
2.Meaning of text --- locate in the relation of past to present Textual interpretation --- a question of reconstructing the reader’s “horizon of expectation”（期待视野） (文本的意义要通过过去与现在的关系来把握，文本的解 读在很大程度上是一个重构读者“期待视野”的过程)
(2)R.G.Collingwood’s definition of history.
R.G. Collingwood --- history is nothing but the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s mind. A literary work is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence. 一部文学作品更像是一曲管弦乐，永远在读者心中激起新的回响， 它把文本从严词材料中解脱出来，赋予他以现实的存在。 This dialogical character of the literary work also establishes why philological understanding can exist only in a perpetual confrontation with the text, and cannot be allowed to be reduced to a knowledge of facts. 文学作品的这种对话性决定了语言研究必须不断面向文本，而不 能简化成对事实的了解。
e. The philologists of my generation have replaced the traditional presentation of their national literature by periods and as a whole with lectures on the history of a problem or with other systematic approaches. f. Collective projects in the form of handbooks, encyclopedias, and series of collected interpretations have driven out literary histories as unserious and presumptuous. g. Serious scholarship prefer the stricter standard of the literary critical methods (stylistic, rhetoric, textual philology, semantics, poetics, morphology, historical philology, and the history of motifs and genres)
(3)Friedrich Schiller’s definition of history • Can promise so little instruction to the “thoughtful observer”, no imitative model at all to the “active man of the world”, no important information to the “philosopher”, and everything else but a “source of the noblest pleasure” to the reader. • 对爱思考的读者没能提供什么指导，对头脑活跃者根本没 有提供可供模仿的模式，对哲学家则提供不出什么重要的 信息，向读者提供不出最高贵的快乐之源泉。
1.The brief introduction of Hans Robert Jauss
(1) Hans Robert Jauss (1921---) a. Studied at the U of Heidelberg b. Taught since 1966 at the newly established U of Constance c. One of the two representatives of the Constance School of Rezeptionasathetik （美学康斯坦茨学派） d. Known for a hermeneutically（阐释学） based approach to literature and liarranging the literature history
(1) The first way: a mere anal-like lining up of the facts by arranging its material according to general tendencies, genres, and whathave-you Disadvantages: The author’s biography and the evaluation of their pop up in some accidental spot, in the manner of an occasional aside. It is more often in the modern literature.
4.What is literature history?
(1)Dilemma: • Gervinus: Simply sets the life and work of the writers one after another in a chronological series is no history, it is scarcely the skeleton of a history. • It is not only rare but forbidden that a literary historian should hold judgments of quality concerning the works of past ages.
(2) How to deal with the dilemma? Appeal to the idea of objectivity of historiography, which only has to describe “how is really was.” Reason: a. His aesthetic abstinences has good grounds. For the quality and rank of a literary work result from the criteria of influence, reception, and posthumous fame, criteria that are more difficult to grasp. b. If the author left the judgments of his own, he remains in his historical distance most often one to two generations behinds the latest development in literature.