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Hans Robert Jauss is a professor of literary criticism and romance philology at the University of Constance in Germany. Jauss co-founded the University of Constance and the Constance group of literary studies. Hans Robert Jauss's version of reception theory was introduced in the late 1960s, a period of social, political, and intellectual instability in West Germany. Jauss's reception theory focused on the reader rather than the author or text. The original reception of a text was compared to a later reception, revealing different literary receptions and their evolution. Jauss's Rezeptionsgeschichte (history of reception) illustrated the evolution of the reception of texts and the evolving paradigms of literary criticism that they were a part of. However, Jauss's essays proved to be more of a provocation for change in literary criticism than the foundation for the next literary paradigm. The empirical studies discussed in this thesis reveal the.idealism of Jauss's theory by testing main ideas and concepts. The results show the inapplicability of Jauss's theory for practical purposes. The intent of this study is to illustrate the origins, development and impact of Jauss's version of reception theory. The interrelationship between the social environment, the institutional reforms at the University of Constance, and the methodology of reception theory are also discussed. The new social values in West Germany advocated individualism and questioned status quo institutions and their authority. This facilitated the establishment of the University of Constance, which served as the prototype for the democratization of German universities and the introduction of Jauss's reception theory. With the democratization of the university, old autonomous faculties were broken down into interdisciplinary subject areas. The Old Philology and New Philology department were made into the sciences of language and literature and ultimately introduced as the all-encompassing literaturwissenschaft. Five professors from the Slavic, English, German, Classics and Romance language departments gave up direction of these large departments to work together under the Constance reforms in an effort to form a new concept of literary studies. The result was the socalled theories of "reception" and "effect" which they continue to research.

In May 1945, United States Military Government (MG) detachments arrived in assigned areas of Bavaria to launch the occupation. By the summer of 1945, the US occupiers became the ironical combination of stern victor and watchful master. Absolute control gave way to the "direction" of German authority. For this process to succeed, MG officials had to establish a stable, clearly defined and fundamentally strict environment in which German officials would begin to exercise token control. The early occupation was a highly unstable stage of chaos, fear and confusing objectives. MG detachments and the reconstituted German authorities performed complex tasks with many opportunities for failure. In this environment, a crucial MG obligation was to help secure law and order for the defeated and dependent German populace whose previously existing authorities had been removed. Germans themselves remained largely peaceful, yet unforeseen actors such as liberated "Displaced Persons" rose to menace law and order. The threat of criminal disorder and widespread black market activity posed great risks in the early occupation. This thesis demonstrates how US MG established its own authority in the Munich area in 1945, and how that authority was applied and challenged in the realm of criminal law and order. This study explores themes not much researched. Thorough description of local police reestablishment or characteristic crime issues hardly exists. There is no substantial local examination of the relationship between such issues and the early establishment of MG authority. Local MG records housed in the Bayertsches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Bavarian Main State Archives) provide most of the primacy sources. This study also relies heavily on German-language secondary sources.

During the Protestant evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widely-circulated hymnals carried the message of evangelicals by way of mouth across great periods of time and vast geographic expanses. This study traces the cultural route of specific religious expressions in these hymns as they crossed national, linguistic, ecclesiastic, social, and other cultural barriers to become ubiquitous expressions found in religious, social, and political discourses. More specifically, this dissertation traces the route of fleshly-spiritual imagery in Baroque Lutheran and German Pietist hymns as they traveled to England by way of the Wesleys during the eighteenth-century evangelical revival and eventually surfaced during the Methodist revivals of the Second Great Awakening in nineteenth-century America. Fleshly-spiritual imagery, that concretizes spiritual experience in the human body, expressed a change in religious subjectivity experienced by Protestant revivalists in the period. This imagery captures an epistemological change in progress as individuals took authority from the clergy to commune directly with the Divine and judge the validity of that experience for themselves. Rather than framing this work as a study of specific authors or literary movements, I have traced the historical trajectory of a set of discursive practices as they were used by hymn authors, re-written by hymn editors, and often spontaneously reedited by participants. This discursive approach without regard to authorship and often in absence of standard texts more clearly illuminates the convergence of religious and public rhetoric, an intersection that remains occluded by traditional studies of a single author, genre, literary period, or national literature. / text

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The thesis explores the vexed concept of Heimat in recent German culture. Heimat evokes an exclusive group, founded on the idea of the unity and homogeneity of its members. Conflicts arise around the concept because it constructs oppositions between those who belong and those who do not, insiders and outsiders, the domestic and known in opposition to the foreign and strange. Historically, the concept has been used to tell a story about the cohesion of the German nation; it has also, however, been used to assimilate, eliminate, or exile its Others. The thesis examines how the legacies of the concept and its narrative reverberate through the nation-building process of Germany today. The concept of Heimat is active in films, literature, the law and contemporary German society. The argument is that the concept of Heimat still shapes German identity in ways that use old forms and oppositions to respond to recent social changes. It is argued further that the tensions around the concept have not diminished, but are spreading into many different areas of German everyday life. Two films by Edgar Reitz provide the starting point for exploring the tensions around Heimat in contemorary German culture. Following readings of texts by Jewish-German, Austrian- German, Swiss-German, Persian-German, Rumanian-German, East and West German authors show the concept persisting in different forms with different consequences, according to the different cultural contexts. In each of these contexts, the concept of German Heimat produces both social cohesion and social tensions. As much as people are united by the concept, they are also driven apart by its differentiating and disintegrating mechanisms. Motivated by the search for communal intimacy, the concept also has the effect of controlling and manipulating what appears different and alien. As such a network of interests and strategies it is not merely closed, fixed and bounded, as desired perhaps by the dominant cultural groups, but rather open for contestation and negotiation within and across national borders.

This dissertation focuses on the emergence of self-awareness in women of the early 17th century as exemplified by Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638), a native of Greifswald in North Germany. It analyses the feminist components of her work. Her poetic production, preserved in the anthology Deutsche Poetische Gedichte (1650), consists of 105 poems, four prose introductions and three letters. It is the output of a writer whose short life of 17 years plays itself out against the backdrop of a century shattered by the Thirty Years' War, religious strife, the plague, oppression and social unrest. Topics such as friendship, love, female self-awareness, or the contrasting realities of women and men are the themes through which she explores an androcentric society and establishes herself as an advocate for the acceptance of women as full members of society. With her motto Du solst mich doch nicht unterdrucken ("You shall not suppress me") she insists on her equality as a woman and a writer. The defiance of her "natural" role as a woman expresses itself ambivalently, through observing social conventions while at the same time striving to undermine them. Sibylle Schwarz, unlike any other German bourgeois woman author between 1550 and 1650, has written poetry engaging in social criticism that corroborates and at the same time transcends the inferior status of women within a patriarchal structure. This unique nature of her writings makes them an important milestone in the emergence of female intellectual autonomy. The first two of six major sections state the goals of my research, a survey of the materials used and the methodology to be followed. Part III sets the context of a society in which women were limited to a narrow range of roles. In Part IV the conditions in which women lived, worked, and were brought up, from the institutionalised lack of educational opportunity to social, conventional and legal barriers to their full participation in society are being explored. Part V gives an extensive analysis of Sibylle Schwarz's work, relating it to her personal situation and to the themes already developed, with an accounting of her thoughts and ideas about her culture, her society and her gender. Part VI summarises the work and states its conclusions.

Drawing on insights from feminist scholarship and gender studies, this thesis offers a new reading of selected medieval German texts with a special emphasis on the negotiation of gender and power. All three parts of the thesis demonstrate how the use of modern theories helps us to re-examine a medieval text's implications and ethical values, and to reconsider traditional views of the text. Part One focuses on the discussion of gender boundaries. Didactic and fictional texts, such as Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der welsche Gast and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst, show that violations of gender boundaries and the questioning of the traditional power relationship between the genders are crucial to the textual negotiation of masculinity and femininity. As I demonstrate in Part Two, the unequal relationship between men and women is especially important for the system of male homosocial bonding underlying medieval society. Examples of the physical and symbolic exchange of women and their favours are offered by didactic texts, such as Marquard vom Stein's Der Ritter vom Turn, and fictional texts, such as the Nibelungenlied. Aspects of this exchange are not solely related to medieval marriage practices, but are also reflected in courtly rituals, such as "frouwen schouwen" (watching the ladies). The importance of the conventionally beautiful female body as an object of exchange becomes obvious in Part Three, where I examine encounters between Christian knights and women defying the norms of feminine beauty. Here I focus on female figures that are defined as "doubly Other": both in their relationship to the masculine Self, and in their relationship to the ideal of medieval Christian femininity. Texts such as Wolfdietrich B and Der Strieker's Die Konigin vom Mohrenland show how the negotiation of gender and power assumes a new dimension in light male encounters with Wild Women, heathen women, "supernatural" women and old women, where the male partner often has to struggle to uphold his privileged masculine position.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.