Career
In 1959, Jauss took up his first teaching appointment as associate professor and director of the Romance Seminar at the University of Münster, Westfalen. In 1961, he moved to the University of Gießen, where, as full professor, he helped in the restructuring of the Romance Seminar.
It was in these years (1959–1962) that Jauss, along with Erich Köhler, founded a series of medieval texts entitled Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Outline of Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages). In 1963, he also played a prominent role in establishing the research group "Poetik und Hermeneutik" with two other colleagues from Gießen (Hans Blumenberg and Clemens Heselhaus), along with Wolfgang Iser from Würzburg.
The year 1966 saw the founding of the University of Constance as part of the reform of the German university system taking place at that time. Jauss was invited by his former teacher Gerhard Hess to join the staff. Doing away with previous autonomous institutes, the new university at Constance was set up with a cooperative and cross-disciplinary structure of "Units of Teaching and Research," following the Humbold principle of developing teaching out of research. Working on numerous committees, Jauss was particularly involved with setting up the "subject area" (Fachbereiche) of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft), an innovative structure at the time but soon to be emulated throughout Germany. Five professors, surrendering the privileges of departmental chairmanship in their different language fields, organised themselves into a research group that soon became known internationally as "The Constance School": Wolfgang Iser (English), Wolfgang Preisendanz (German), Manfred Fuhrmann (Latin), Hans Robert Jauss (Romance), and Jurij Striedter (Slavic). Jauss’s own inaugural lecture in 1967, entitled "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory", was dramatic and programmatic in its call for a new approach to literary studies. The ensuing years saw an application and development of that program, at times in vigorous debate with a diversity of dialogue partners.
Throughout his career, he was guest professor at the University of Zürich (winter semester 1967/68); at the Freie Universität Berlin (winter semester 1968/69); at Columbia University, New York (Fall 1973); at Yale University, New Haven (Spring 1976; turning down an offer to go there again in 1977); at the Sorbonne (Paris IV, winter semester, 1978); at the University of Leuven (Franqui-Professur, 1982); at the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 1982); at the University of California (1985); at Princeton University (Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow, February 1986); and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Brittingham Visiting Professor of English, March 1986).
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