Hans Robert Jauss

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Autograph of Hans Robert Jauss, 1972

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

33rd Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne".[1]

In 1944, he was able to begin his studies and complete his first

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 the philologist Gerhard Hess, was entitled Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts
«À la recherche du temps perdu» [Time and Memory in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time].

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

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

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 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).

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

Professor Emeritus of the University. He died in Konstanz
.

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

33rd Waffen Grenadier Division) and that Jauss falsified documents and glossed over his autobiography. Westemeier expanded on his work to later publish the monograph Hans Robert Jauß. Jugend, Krieg und Internierung (Hans Robert Jauss. Youth, War and Internment).[4]

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ^ Ernst Klee, Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 282.
  2. ^ 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).
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ 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.