Erwartangsborizont

Erwartangsborizont (pronounced eah-wah-tum-swar-eh-sont)

(1) In English use, as “horizon of expectations”, a term from literary theory to denote the criteria readers use to judge texts in any given period.

(2) The conceivable content of a literary work or text based on the context of the time of publication (German).

(3) In formal education, the specified performance required in an examination situation (German).

Circa 1944: German determinative compound using the nouns Erwartung (expectation) and Horizont (horizon) with the connecting element “s”.  In German use, in the context of formal education, while not exactly synonymous, (1) solution expectation, (2) solution proposal & (3) sample solution impart a similar meaning.  Erwartangsborizont is a masculine noun; the noun plural is Erwartungshorizonte.  In German, both the spelling of the word and the article preceding the word can change depending on whether it is in the nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative case, thus the declension (in grammar the categorization of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives according to the inflections they receive) is:

Erwartangsborizont: a word which rose with post-modernism.

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

The German compound noun term Erwartangsborizont was popularized in the 1960s by Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) and he used it to denote the criteria which readers use to judge literary texts in any given period; he first fully explained the term in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory (1967)).  Jauss was a German academic who worked in the field of Rezeptionsästhetik (reception theory) as well as medieval and modern French literature; Erwartangsborizont (his concept of “horizon of expectation”) was his most enduring contribution to literary theory and his pre-scholarly background could in itself be used as something of a case study in his readers’ “horizon of expectation”: During World War II (1939-1945), Jauss served in both the SS and Waffen-SS.

Hans Robert Jauß: Youth, War and Internment (2016) by Jens Westemeier (b 1966), pp 367, Konstanz University Press (ISBN-13: 978-3835390829).

The SS (ᛋᛋ in Armanen runes; Schutzstaffel (literally “protection squadron” but translated variously as “protection squad”, “security section" etc)) was formed (under different names) in 1923 as a Nazi party squad to provide security at public meetings (then often rowdy and violet affairs), later evolving into a personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945).  The SS name was adopted in 1925 and during the Third Reich the institution evolved into a vast economic, industrial and military apparatus (more than two million strong), to the point where some historians (and contemporaries) regarded it as a kind of “state within a state”.  The Waffen-SS (armed SS (ie equipped with heavy weapons)) existed on a small scale as early as 1933 before Hitler’s agreement was secured to create a formation at divisional strength and growth was gradual even after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 triggered an expansion into a multi-national armoured force with over 900,000 men under arms deployed in a variety of theatres.  As well as the SS’s role in the administration of the many concentration and extermination camps, the Waffen-SS in particular was widely implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His service in the SS and Waffen-SS included two winters spent on the Russian Front with all that implies but it wouldn’t be until 1995 the documents relating to his conduct in the occupied territories were published and historians used the papers to prove the persona he’d created during the post-war years had been constructed with obfuscation, lies and probably much dissembling.  Despite that, Jauss had been dead for almost two decades before an investigation revealed he’d falsified documents from the era as was probably implicated in war crimes committed by the SS & Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front.

Portrait of Martin Heidegger, oil on canvas by Michael Newton (b 1970).

Although the influence of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has attracted much comment because of his flirtation with the Nazis, the most significant intellectual impact on Jauss was the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) who, although he lived to an impressive 102, was precluded by ill heath from serving in the military in either of the world wars.  Gadamer's most notable contribution to philosophy was to build on Heidegger’s concept of “philosophical hermeneutics” (an embryonic collection of theories about the interpretation of certain texts) and these Gardamer expanded and developed in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method (1960)).  The title was significant because Gadamer argued “truth” and “method” (as both were understood within the social sciences) were oppositional forces because what came to be called truth came to be dictated by whichever method of analysis was applied to a text: “Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge — but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth?”

Portrait of Hans-Georg Gadamer, oil on canvas by Dora Mittenzwei (b 1955).

The aspect of what Heidegger and Gardamer built which most interested Jauss was what he came to call the “aesthetics of reception” a term which designates the shared set of assumptions which can be attributed to any given generation of readers and these criteria can be used to assist “in a trans-subjective way”, the formation of a judgment of a text.  The point was that over time (which, depending on circumstances, can mean over decades or overnight), for both individuals and societies, horizons of expectation change.  In other words, the judgment which at one time was an accepted orthodoxy may later come to be seem a quaint or inappropriate; the view of one generation does not of necessity become something definitive and unchanging.  Jauss explained this by saying: “A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period.  It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.”  He may or may not have been thinking about German society’s changing view of his military career (and his post-war representation of it was itself something of a literary work) but the point was that people reinterpret texts in the light of their own knowledge and experience (their “cultural environment”).

That set of processes he described as constructing a literary value measured according to “aesthetic distance”, the degree to which a work departs from the Erwartangsborizont (horizon of expectations) of earlier readers.  One reviewer summarized things by suggesting the horizon of expectations was “detectable through the textual strategies (genre, literary allusion, the nature of fiction and of poetical language) which confirm, modify, subvert or ironize the expectations of readers” while aesthetic distance becomes a measure of literary value, “creating creating a spectrum on one end of which lies 'culinary' (totally consumable) reading, and, on the other, works which have a radical effect on their readers.”.  In the arcane world of literary theory, more than one commentator described that contribution as: “helpful”.  Opinions may differ.

The term “horizon of expectations” obviously is related to the familiar concept of the “cultural context”, both concepts dealing with the ways in which texts are understood within a specific time, place, and cultural framework.  To academics in the field, they are not wholly synonymous but for general readers of texts they certainly appear so.  The elements of the models are the sets of norms, values, conventions, and assumptions that a particular audience brings to a text at a given moment in time and space, expectations shaped by cultural, historical, and literary contexts but in academia the focus specifically is on the audience's interpretive framework.  The processes are dynamic in that although what happens externally can contribute to determining how a work is received and understood by its audience, if a work conforms to or challenges these expectations, it influences its reception and the potential for the work to reshape those horizons; it’s not exactly symbiotic but certainly it’s interactive.

Cady's Map by Janis Ian.

A film is just another piece of text and what is variously acceptable, funny, confronting or shocking to one generation might be viewed entirely differently by those which follow.  The faction names of the cliques at North Shore High School (Mean Girls, Paramount Pictures 2004)) were Actual Human Beings, Anti-Plastics, The Art Freaks, Asexual Band Geeks, Asian Nerds, Burnouts, Cheerleaders, Cool Asians, Desperate Wannabes, Freshmen, Girls Who Eat Their Feelings, J.V. Cheerleaders, J.V. Jocks, Junior Plastics, Preps, ROTC Guys, Sexually Active Band Geeks, The Plastics, Unfriendly Black Hotties, Unnamed Girls Who Don't Eat Anything & Varsity Jocks and given the way sensitivities have evolved, it’s predictable some of those names wouldn’t today be used; the factions' membership rosters might be much the same but some terms are now proscribed in this context, the threshold test for racism now its mere mention, racialism banished to places like epidemiological research papers tracking the distribution of obesity, various morbidities and such.