Hans Robert Jauss' reader-response criticism as the principle of constitution and development of the literary tradition

The analysis and conceptualization of Hans Robert Jauss' reader-response criticism's methodologies is of particular interest and significance for eliciting literary tradition's determination and development principles as well as defining the ontological status of art.Serving as the theories base, the dialectic relations between the text and its recipient, who acts as the conception's central methodological construct, provides understanding of a literary texts' perception and comprehension through the model of a dialogue. Since a literary text can be repeatedly perceived in the historical perspective, its relevance and interpretation can undergo many modifications from the point of view of changing aesthetical attitudes. Consequently, the reoccurring relevance of a literary text and the gradual adaptation of its semantic potential can be described as a procedural continuum in historically successive acts of perception. The principle liability of literary texts to subsequent receptions and reinterpreta-tions presupposes the existence of a certain context that provides the transsubjective perception and effect of the text and makes it open to continuous interpretation. In H.R. Jauss' aesthetic system this function is performed by the "horizon of expectations" - an a priori knowledge of the perceiving public that is based on the previously acquired literary or life experience that makes the perception and understanding of the text as well as its comparison to other texts possible. Thus it's the procedural aesthetic perception which presupposes interpretational variability and the mobility of relevance of literary texts that constitutes the general literary tradition as well as its persistent historical formation. Reader-response criticism also accounts for productive relations between literary texts. According to the theory, each literary work that brings up a certain formal or semantic problem leaves a variety of possible solutions that can be developed by the following works of literature. This process of producing new texts on the basis of existing literary experience is the cause of the consequent "transformation of the horizon of expectations" and the general literary traditions' dynamic and development. Thus the procedural aesthetic perception of literary works helps establish the event and immanent connections in the history of literature as well as the variable and fixed factors in the dynamic of the literary process.

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