Abstract
Compared to the tradition of literary history, the Konstanz School shifted the point of view: from the sender, the focus of the critical gaze was dislocated, in the aesthetics of reception, to the receiver. Reception studies thus modified the approaches that seemed to define the “French school” of Comparative Literature. Historians then seized on this method and extended it in the development of a theory of cultural transfers, involving a reflection on the rather vague notion of culture: this notion left a predominant place for literature, so that the notion entered literary criticism: the point of view was no longer centered on the sender milieu, nor on the receiver milieu, but on the process of transformation and appropriation at work in the transfer. Among historians, the notion of “transfer” has finally given way to that of “cross-history”, which assumes that any transfer is based on an exchange. These methodological developments underline the importance of studying displacements and transformations in cultural phenomena.
Presenters
Bernard FrancoProfessor, French and Comparative Literature, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION, KONSTANZ SCHOOL, CULTURAL TRANSFERS, CROSS-HISTORY, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
