| The economic recession of 1966-67 and the resulting student revolt-movement in Germany, which agressively examined the background of conventional German literary studies, that until that time had kept literary and social issues separate, led to a fundamental crisis of the literary situation in West Germany. This turn of events, which called for a thorough reassessment of the literary system and the way in which it was embedded in the larger social system, revolutionized the discipline of 'Germanistik' and its theories of literary criticism.;This study, a synchronic crosscut through the diachrony of recent German literature, examines a selection of 20 titles of short prose works, from the four German-speaking countries, published in 1983. The selected works are examined in the light of the 'productive reception', as defined by Gunter Grimm. This includes elements of content such as textbound ideas, problems, motives, singular themes, actions and figures. Stress is placed on the social aspects of the texts.;The goal of the study is to examine the relations between recent sociopolitical events and literature, and to compare them to those of the sixties and the seventies. The concerns are: (1) future-oriented thoughts connected with the possible usage of atomic weapons and the time thereafter, (2) contemporary-oriented problems of modern society, (3) life in modern society, (4) past-oriented new 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung'.;The search for a new paradigm and new methods of literary criticism, reached its peak in the establishment of a new school of criticism, 'reception theory' ('reception aesthetics') introduced by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Their theory seeks to situate a literary work within its historical 'horizon' (cultural meanings within which it was produced) and to explore the dialectic relations between the work and the historical readers that result in changing the readers 'horizons'. By placing emphasis on the ('implied') reader, to whom the literary work is primarily addressed, this theory seeks to establish a new kind of literary history as defined and interpreted by its various moments of historical 'reception', referred to by Jauss as the 'literary history of the reader'. |
