Reception: Eugenics or Contamination. Some Observations on Socio-Historical and Cultural Performatives
Reception: Eugenics or Contamination. Some Observations on Socio-Historical and Cultural Performatives

Summary/Abstract: I would like to define reception studies as an interdisciplinary branch of literary studies which takes as its object those mechanisms by which texts (respectively works of art) become significantly accessible to individual readers and interpreters, groups of interpreters (critics, literary theoreticians, leaders of public opinion) and literary communities, even whole cultures, i.e. how they get actualised in reading and in their further application in social practice. In order to come to grips with such a broad definition (for it includes too many interrelated problems), I would like to highlight the verb b e c o m e as the key word in regard to reception in my understanding. First of all, becoming is a key concept in phenomenology; for phenomenology and existentialism art is said to be the process of becoming par excellence (cf Cazeau 2001: 310). It is through the aesthetic becoming that both the distinction between subject and object and attempts at its overcoming, whereby we shape the world, become possible (ib. 310ff). But reception deals with the problematic of the “estrangement” of the experience of something, the sameness and alterity of the Other. How does becoming, then, relate to reception?

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