Mod det poetiske selv:Narrativ og poetisk tilblivelse i et etnografisk studie af Shared Reading for unge i Danmark

Taking departure in an ethnographic study of Shared Reading in Denmark, this chapter challenges ideas of the narrative self within anthropology and related disciplines. It presents theories about how the effective, or healing, element in literature reading is a reconstitution of one’s selfhood through recognition and interpretation of what is read. Such theories assume that human life is lived, or interpreted in retrospect, in a narrative structure that resembles the narratives found in many literary texts. In the reading groups I studied, readers turned out to appreciate the reading group as a utopian everyday space as much as an interpretive therapeutic process. Drawing on phenomenological theory, I therefore suggest that the narrative self is supplemented with the concept of the ‘poetic self’, to shift focus towards how selfhood also emerges in fragmented, yet important, momentary spaces that do not link up to a longer narrative structure.