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1、Literary History as a Challenge to Literary TheoryHans Robert JaussIn our time literary history has increasingly fallen into disrepute, and not at all without reason. The history of this worthy discipline in the last one hundred and fifty years unmistakably describes the path of a steady decline. It
2、s greatest achievements all belong to the nineteenth century. To write the history of a national literature counted, in the times of Gervinus and Scherer, De Sanctis and Lanson, as the crowning lifes work of the philologist. The patriarchs of the discipline saw their highest goal therein, to represe
3、nt in the history of literary works Dichtwerke the idea of national individuality on its way to itself. This high point is already a distant memory. The received form of literary history scarcely scratches out a living for itself in the intellectual life of our time. It has maintained itself in requ
4、irements for examinations by the state system of examinations that are themselves ready for dismantling. As a compulsory subject in the high school curriculum, it has almost disappeared in Germany. Beyond that, literary histories are still to be found only, if at all, on the bookshelves of the educa
5、ted bourgeoisie who for the most part opens them, lacking a more appropriate literary dictionary, to answer literary quiz questions.In university course catalogs literary history is clearly disappearing. It has long been no secret that the philologists of my generation even rather pride themselves i
6、n having replaced the traditional presentation of their national literature by periods and as a whole with lectures on the history of a problem or with other systematic approaches. Scholarly production offers a corresponding picture: collective projects in the form of handbooks, encyclopedias, and (
7、as the latest offshoot of the so-called “publishers synthesis”) series of collected interpretations have driven out literary histories as unserious and presumptuous. Significantly, such pseudohistorical collections seldom derive from the initiative of scholars, rather most often from the whim of som
8、e restless publisher. Serious scholarship on the other hand precipitates into monographs in scholarly journals and presupposes the stricter standard of the literary critical methods of stylistics, rhetoric, textual philology, semantics, poetics, morphology, historical philology, and the history of m
9、otifs and genres. Philological scholarly journals today are admittedly in good part still filled with articles that content themselves with a literary historical approach. But their authors find themselves facing a twofold critique. Their formulations of the question are, from the perspective of nei
10、ghboring disciplines, qualified publicly or privately as pseudo-problems, and their results put aside as mere antiquarian knowledge. The critique of literary theory scarcely sees the problem any more clearly. It finds fault with classical literary history in that the latter pretends to be only one f
11、orm of history writing, but in truth operates outside the historical dimension and thereby lacks the foundation of aesthetic judgment demanded by its object-literature as one of the arts.This critique should first be made clear. Literary history of the most convenient forms tries to escape from the
12、dilemma of a mere annal-like lining-up of the facts by arranging its material according to general tendencies, genres, and what-have-you, in order then to treat within these rubrics the individual works in chronological series. In the form of an excursis, the authors biography and the evaluation of
13、their oeuvre pop up in some accidental spot here, in the manner of an occasional aside. Or this literary history arranges its material unilinearly, according to the chronology of great authors, and evaluates them in accordance with the schema of “life and works;” the lesser authors are here overlook
14、ed (they are settled in the interstices), and the development of genres must thereby also unavoidably be dismembered. The second form is more appropriate to the canon of authors of the classics; the first is found more often in the modern literatures that have to struggle with the difficulty-growing
15、 up to and in the present-of making a selection from a scarcely surveyable list of authors and works.But a description of literature that follows an already sanctioned canon and simply sets the life and work of the writers one after another in a chronological series is, as Gervinus already remarked,
16、 “no history; it is scarcely the skeleton of a history.” By the same token, no historian would consider historical a presentation of literature by genres that, registering changes from work to work, followed the unique laws of the forms of development of the lyric, drama, and novel and merely framed the unclarified character of the literary development with a general observation (for the most part borrowed from historical studies) concerning the Zeitgeist and the political te
