An Interview with Hans Robert Jauss

Q: In 1972 you came to the conclusion that the of had introduced a new paradigm for literary studies. Do you still hold this opinion? Rene Wellek, for example, has demurred, noting that there have always been investigations like the of reception; Manfred Naumann speaks of a swing of the pendulum rather than a change of paradigms. In other words, what was paradigmatically new that the of brought to literary studies? A: As in other disciplines, a scholarly change of paradigms in literary studies is not an event that falls from heaven like some pure innovation. When a new paradigm is effective, this is judged by the new questions which it can formulate for old problems, by seeing whether it can solve them in new ways, by unknown problems which thereby come to light, and by seeing whether, in all these cases, methods can be developed which contribute to the enrichment of the scholarly tradition. The history of art has always played itself out as a process among author, work, and public; the dialectic of production and has always been mediated through the interaction of the two, that is, through literary communication. In this sense, the aesthetics of reception was always possible, but this is not to say what Rene Wellek means, namely, that there also always were investigations like the of reception. Before the beginning of the great period of historicism, at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, literary was always seen from the perspective of an of effect [Wirkungsisthetik] which stood in the tradition of rhetoric and Aristotelian poetics, but which was not interested in the historical conditions of the aesthetic effect of works of art. The last

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