Reception theory

Reception theory examines how audiences’ expectations, experiences, and historical contexts shape the meanings they make from works of literature, art, and media.

Hans Robert Jauss: A German literary scholar who developed reception aesthetics and the concept of a horizon of expectations. His account makes historical audience expectations central to literary interpretation.
Constance School: A group of literary scholars at the University of Konstanz associated with the rise of reception aesthetics. Jauss and Iser developed influential accounts of reception there in the late twentieth century.
Reception history: The study of how a work has been interpreted, circulated, and valued over time. It applies reception theory to document a work’s changing meanings and reputations.
Intentional fallacy: The claim that an author’s intended meaning should not determine a literary work’s interpretation. Reception theory also resists authorial intention as the sole authority, but centers audiences instead.
Horizon of expectations: The historically formed assumptions and conventions that shape how an audience encounters a work. It describes the expectations against which a work can seem familiar, challenging, or new.
Phenomenology: A philosophical tradition that studies structures of experience and how things appear to consciousness. Iser drew on phenomenological accounts of experience to describe the act of reading.
Reader-response criticism: A family of literary approaches that treats readers’ activity as central to the production of meaning. It shares reception theory’s attention to audiences while often emphasizing individual reading processes.
Authorial intention: The purpose or meaning an author intends to convey through a work. Reception theory distinguishes an intended meaning from meanings audiences produce in particular contexts.
Wolfgang Iser: A German literary theorist who analyzed how textual structures guide readers’ acts of interpretation. His account explains how a work invites readers to supply connections it leaves unstated.
Roman Ingarden: A Polish philosopher who described literary works as structured objects that readers concretize through reading. His account of textual gaps helped prepare the ground for Iser’s theory of reading.

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