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ABSTRACT
Maria Louise Christensen: The extended reading experience
A study of how paratexts, reading groups, and author meetings can affect readers’
reading experiences.
Master’s Thesis, Aarhus University 2012.
As recipients of literary works, readers play an important role in the communication circuit of
books, and the book- and print industry would most likely be ill off without readers. Following the
French literary sociologist Robert Escarpit, one might even call reading the objective and
justification for literature itself (Escarpit: 159). Even so, literary theory has paid little attention to the
empirical readers and their practice. The reader-response theory largely views the reader as a ‘field’,
i.e. as a function, which plays a role in relation to the text but they completely overlook the
phenomenological reader’s terms and limitations. Book historians close in on interesting areas of
reading and reception to be studied and are more aware of phenomenological readers. Still, neither
reader-response theorists nor book historians have involved themselves in larger empirical studies of
reading and readers. The book industry could probably also benefit from a greater knowledge about
readers, but as a result of the commercial competition they are much more preoccupied with selling
books than making sure they are actually read.
The present study investigates real flesh-and-blood readers and their literary practice
through an online questionnaire and multiple qualitative interviews with two reading groups, plus
observations from one of their reading group meetings and one of their author meetings. Using the
sociology of literature as a methodical approach this study aims to explore how activities outside the
literary work (i.e. reading of para- and metatexts, participation in reading groups and author
meetings) can affect readers’ reading experiences.
Reading experiences can be explained theoretically as subjective and physically anchored
experiences which especially concerns the reader’s cognitive and emotional reactions (psycho-
experience). This thesis, albeit, points out that it is only possible to approach real reading experiences
when speaking about and to actual readers.
Maria Louise Christensen: Den udvidede læseoplevelse
The analysis shows that readers’ motivation to read is based on the directly noticeable
experience-orientated gains like relaxation and entertainment, but also in the anticipation of the
existential realisations that reading can lead to. The study shows that readers are very much
interested in learning more about the text than the reading itself can offer. Seen from an
experience-orientated point of view books can in this way be seen as ‘pure experience products’
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