Meaning, Reception, and the Use of Classics: Theoretical Considerations in a Chinese Context

1. Reception Theory and Classical Studies

According to Charles Martindale, Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol, reception theory has invigorated the study of Greek and Roman classics in the UK and the US, with such academic indicators as conference panels and course offerings on both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as a special category set up for the purpose of research assessment of classical studies, and as publisher’s requirement of a substantial reception element to be included in such book series as Cambridge Companions to ancient authors, etc. The adaptation of reception theory, says Martindale, has become “perhaps the fastest-growing area of the subject” since the early 1990s (2). As he acknowledges, reception theory originated in Hans Robert Jauss’s argument for a paradigmatic change in the study of literary history, his plea for paying critical attention to the historicity of interpretation or what he called Rezeptionsästhetik, which in turn owes a great deal to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, particularly the concept of the “fusion of horizons.”¹ If we look at reception theory and indeed Gadamerian hermeneutics in the context of 20th-century intellectual history, we may see that they form part of the general tendency in the postwar world towards a more open and more self-consciously historical perspective that moves away from the 19th-century positivistic beliefs in the objectivity, progress, and scientific truth in human understanding and knowledge. “Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better,” as Gadamer puts it. “It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (296-97). This remark clearly indicates the shift of emphasis in modern hermeneutics from a stable meaning in a correct understanding based on the recovery of the authorial intention to the variability of meaning based on the diversity of subjective perspectives or horizons. People understand differently because they have different subjective positions, and recognition of the important role played by that subjectivity necessarily leads to the recognition of the reader’s or the spectator’s function in making sense in understanding and interpretation.

In Jauss’s argument, a literary work is “not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period,” but it is “much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence” (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception 21). The idea that a literary work is not immobile, but always changing in the aesthetic experience of reading as a “contemporary existence,” can be traced to Gadamer’s discussion of the work of art as play, which is always a “presentation for an audience” (109). Reception theory can be said to have built on Gadamer’s understanding of art as play and the experience of art as participation, on the concept of “contemporaneity,” which means, as Gadamer explains, “that in its presentation this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves full presence, however remote its origin may be. Thus contemporaneity is not a mode of givenness in consciousness, but a task for consciousness and an achievement that is demanded of it” (127). That is to say, in a spectator’s or a reader’s aesthetic experience, the work of art achieves full presence in the consciousness and becomes something that exists at the present moment, “contemporaneous” with the reader’s consciousness, even though the work itself may originate in a remote past. From this we may conclude that meaning of a literary work or a classic is always the merging of what the work says and what the reader understands it as saying in the contemporary situation, a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons.” The study of reception is thus the study of how the fusion of horizons happens in the reading of a classic, and how the changes of horizons constitute the history of a classic’s reading and interpretation. Reception acknowledges the historicity of understanding, and sees all texts, including the classics, as having...