Our basis for inquiry is literature and reading of literature as a human form of experience and knowing, grounded in the thesis that literature can be a space for mirroring, emotional experience, self-reflection, and understanding of other people’s motivations and actions. The point of departure is thus a classical idea of cultural formation, which is possible to trace back to Aristoteles’ Poetics. Recently, Martha Nussbaum formulated that the distinctive feature of literary reading is that it can open up a space of knowledge and cultivation of feelings and actions. But on what grounds can research in literary fiction theoretically formulate this and how can it be explored methodologically?

An investigation of the working mechanisms of literature reading is currently taking place within empirical studies of literature, which is dominated by respectively a cognitive and a phenomenological school of thought. The cognitive research in fiction assumes with the notion of simulation that literature makes up a privileged space for social learning. In line with this, the effect of literature on pro-sociality is investigated, as well as the possible mechanisms, which steer this effect and which literary reading particularly trains. The phenomenological reader-response-tradition draws on Rosenblatt’s definition of literary reading as a “living through”. On this background, the hypothesis has been made, that the literary experience itself is the mediating factor of the affective transformation that can take place in reading.

The current empirical research is methodologically limited because the phenomenon itself, literature, as an emotional “living through” and social learning, disappears when reading becomes the object of experimental manipulation. SR comprises an innovative methodological move, where it is possible, through live-reading, to bring together personal and social dimensions and investigate, when and how literary reading functions as an emotional catalyst and promotes social learning.

The subprojects address the overall research questions through three methodically and theoretically different prisms. Three joint peer-reviewed articles will assemble the research results of the project:

• “Shared reading, imagination and agency: an intervention among socially vulnerable youth in Denmark”
• “Psychological well-being as an effect of participation in shared reading groups”
• “How is reading engagement facilitated: text or instruction?”

Research objectives:

• To investigate the social and aesthetic processes in SR and the programme ’Shared Reading: From Participant to Reader Leader’.
• To analyse and document to which extent SR promotes changes in societal engagement, including participation in civic, leisure, as well as work life.
• To develop methods for documenting the extent to which participation in SR supports empowerment.
• To describe a paradigmatic case for the collaboration between research, aesthetics, and social work.