How to write reader response criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROLon •

Reception theory, the approach to literature that concerns itself first and foremost with one or more readers’ actualization of the text, is based on a collective enterprise that has had far-reaching institutional consequences.

Hans Robert Jauss, with his University of Constance colleagues Manfred Fuhrmann and Wolfgang Iser and with philosophers, historians, and critics such as Rainer Warning, Karlheinz Stierle, Dieter Henrich, Günther Buck, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Szondi, and Hans Blumenberg, is part of a loosely organized group that gathers regularly at colloquia, the proceedings of which are published in the multivolume Poetik und Hermeneutik.

The group’s first and most provocative pronouncements were two inaugural addresses at the University of Constance, Jauss’s in 1967, later published as Literaturgeschichte als Provokation für die Literaturwissenschaft (“Literary His