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139 reviews universal law. When all is said and done, Löwy's approach is just as dogmatic as Stalin's. Beneath his dialectical hocus-pocus (fusion of opposites, qualitative leaps, etc.), one detects a rather mechanistic procedure. After being subjected to minor modifications, Trotsky's analysis of the Russian revolution is transformed into a universal explanatory model. As its schémas are imposed upon a variety of radically dissimilar settings, the darkness of uniformity descends upon the world arena— as Hegel said of Schelling, "a night in which all cows are grey." The act of revolution loses its revolutionary quality. We no longer find Uving men, recognizing and seizing the unique opportunities, which each political conjuncture offers for creative initiative. Instead, the world revolution appears as a monotonously repetitious process in which various movements mechanically respond to the same invariant "imperatives ." Löwy sets out to rehabilitate Trotsky. He ends up by laying him to rest in a Procrustean bed. RICHARD JOHNSON Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 7"Ae Institution of Criticism, translated by David Bathrick, Jeannine Blackwell, Henry J. Schmidt, Ronald Smith, and Marc Silverman (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). Pp. 287. $19.50. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, translated by Timothy Bahti, introduction by Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Pp. 264. $22.50 (cloth), $8.95 (paper). Despite its gas and trivialities, literary criticsm is not safe or easy. Its tasks are terrifying in their magnitude, paltry in thdr payoff. Infighting keeps it disciplined and edgy. Competition forces it to conjure novelties, improve precision and arc, or dig in deeper behind the canon. Though eager to meet the needs of readers, literary critics do not agree about what readers read, or should read, or what they need critics for. Criticism is in a crisis of duty: what should it seek? how should it organize? above all, whom should it serve? Hans Robert Jauss and Peter Uwe Hohendahl address literary critics of the journals and classrooms. Hohendahl notes that literary critics should hold no delusions about whom they write for, i.e., themselves. Jauss hasn't given up on reaching, or speaking for, the common reader: "The experience of reading can liberate one from adaptations, prejudices, and predicaments of a lived praxis in that it compels one to a new percetion of things" (TAR, p. 41). Hohendahl calmly argues that if critics reaUy wish to reach the common reader, common reading wUl require much more study. Literary criticism will have to drop its clubs, arcane vocabulary, serpentine prose, and philosophic pretensions; instead it should engage in discussion about best seUers and take advantage of book reviews, one of the few remaining contacts between critics and the pubUc. It would be suspidously self-serving of us to make too much of book reviews here, especially since Hohendahl reminds us of "the relative sodai insignificance of Uterature itself (IC, p. 167). Important differences separate Hohendahl and Jauss, but their shared traditions and prindples may override thdr disagreements. Both are committed to historical research. Both admire Heine. Both respond to Marxist criticism. Each pays homage to his famous teacher: Hohendahl to Habermas (and behind him Brecht and the Frankfurt School), Jauss to Gadamer (and behind him Droysen and Dilthey). Both assert that literary criticism is in crisis—Jauss says in decay—and recommend remedies. Both encourage critics to study the production and reception of Uterature rather than continue the discredited search for its im- 140 the minnesota review manent essence. If Jauss is currently better known in America it is due to the rapid increase of interest in reception aesthetics—also known as reader-response criticism —and to Jauss's adherence to accepted literary heroes: Goethe, Schiller, Stendhal, Flaubert, etc. In the essays collected in Toward an Aesthetic ofReception he studies no authors (excepting critics) more recent than Baudelaire and Valéry. Jauss's revitalization ofUterary history demands a sufficiently historical object. His reception aesthetic necessarily favors texts and genres that have been around a good while. Hohendahl has no objection to reception aesthetics as a component of criticism. He only insists that is is partial, and not a privileged part. One more need...

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