al-Usus al-Fikriyah wa-al-Falsafiyah li-Nazariyat Jamiliyah al-Talaqqi al-Almaniyah [The Intellectual and Philosophical Foundations of German Receptive Aesthetic Theory]

Abstract

This research aims to shed light on the German reception aesthetic theory and its linguistic and idiomatic meaning in Arab and Western criticism. Prague, the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden, the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the sociology of literature, and the founders of the theory, the two German critics Hans Robert Jauss and Wolf Gangizer, at the University of Constance, Germany, benefited from it in formulating the reception aesthetic theory and defining its procedures and statements. The research relied on the inductive approach which focuses on the theory and traces its philosophical and intellectual roots, starting from its particulars and ending to its generalities, and from its particularities to its generalities. It traces the ideas adopted by those schools and their vision of the literary text and the most important statements about the recipient’s use of the text and how these visions contributed to the formulation of the theory. The research has reached several results, the most important of which these five schools influenced the emergence of the reception aesthetic theory, as it was the ideas adopted by these schools. They serve as foundations from which the theory began to build its orientations and perceptions about the literary text and the reader’s position in the creative process. Thus, it became the forefront in analysing the text after the focus was previously on the author and the text.