Hans Robert Jauss
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Hans Robert Jauss (German: Jauß; 12 December 1921 – 1 March 1997) was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory (especially his concept of horizon of expectation) and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Early years and education
Jauss was born in
In 1944, he was able to begin his studies and complete his first
The themes of past and the present, time and remembrance, were already engaging Jauss’s research from the time of his doctorate at the
In 1957, with the treatise Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung, he obtained his habilitation for Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg.
Career
In 1959, Jauss took up his first teaching appointment as associate professor and director of the Romance Seminar at the
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
Throughout his career, he was guest professor at the
Honors and death
In 1980 Jauss became a member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. He was also honoured by the Italian Accademia dei Lincei. After his retirement on 1 April 1987 until his death in 1997, he lived near Constance as
Reevaluating Jauss's past
In 1995, Jauss' SS dossier was first published by the Romance scholar Earl Jeffrey Richards, as part of an evaluation of attacks by former Nazis on Ernst Robert Curtius.[2] Richards later documented Jauss's various falsehoods and fabrications after the war.[3] Despite his unmasking of Jauss's past, however, it would be another two decades before the academy as a whole took stock of his legacy.
In 2014, the
Bibliography
- Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
- Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
- Jauss, Hans Robert. Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding. Translated by Michael Hays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1989.
- Jauss, Hans Robert. Wege des Verstehens. Munich: W. Fink, 1994.
Notes
- ^ Ernst Klee, Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 282.
- ^ Richards, Earl Jeffrey (1995). "La conscience européenne chez Curtius et chez ses détractuers," in: Bem and Guyauz, Ernst Robert Curtius et l'idée d'Europe (Paris: Champion, pp. 257-258).
- ^ Richards, Earl Jeffrey (1997). "Vergangenheitsbewältigung nach dem Kalten Krieg. Der Fall Hans Robert Jauß und das Verstehen" in: Germanisten, Tidskrift för svensk germanistik, Zeitschrift schwedischer Germanisten 2.1, pp. 1-20.
- ^ Ahlrich Meyer: "Fake documents, beautifully colored biography", Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 October 2016
References
- Rush, Ormond. The Reception of Doctrine: An Appropriation of Hans Robert Jauss' Reception Aesthetics and Literary Hermeneutics. Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1997.
- Ette, Ottmar, Der Fall Jauss: Wege des Verstehens in eine Zukunft der Philologie. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016
- Jens Westemeier, Hans Robert Jauss: Jugend, Krieg und Internierung. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2016.