Hans Robert Jauss (Göppingen, December 12, 1921 - Konstanz, March 1, 1997) was a German literature scientist. At the University of Konstanz, Jauss developed in the 1960s with Wolfgang Iser the Rezeptionsesthetik (reception aesthetics). This new way of looking at the reader's reception of a particular literary work became popular in literature in the 1970s, and is related to the English reader response theory.
At the time of the Second World War, Jauss was affiliated with the SS and the Waffen SS. He was also a member of the SS volunteer legion Netherlands.
In 1944 he began studying in Prague, and later in Heidelberg. He studied German literature, Romanian philology, history and philosophy. Jauss graduated from a dissertation about Marcel Proust. In 1967 he was appointed at the University of Konstanz.
Jauss became famous with his work Literaturgeschichte published in 1967 as Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft. In this he wrote a plea against literary history writing as a chronological order of literary facts. He supported a literature history that focuses on the process of ever changing value allocation, sentence and norm change. The work took place in literary scientific developments around 1970, with the text increasingly seen as a culmination in a whole society and literature company, with which literature history became increasingly close to cultural history.
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