Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein.

• Christoph Houswitschka

In the sixties, reception aesthetics had managed to liberate literary studies from divinatory hermeneutics and the aesthetics of expression without, however, falling back onto the turn-of-the-century aesthetics of production. After the author and the text had been at the centre of explaining literary communication, the tables were turned once more, and the focus shifted to ‘the’ reader. The resulting contextualization of literary texts eventually also widened the definition of ‘text’. One of the main concerns reception study explores moving from literary theory to cultural studies is to analyse “the reader’s changing interpretive practices, not theoretical norms or textual figures, to explain a text’s changing significance” (5). Another question is whether “literary study changes the reader’s beliefs or transforms social life”, as Jauss suggested (3).

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