Reader agency and literary instrumentalising: bibliotherapy amid empirical studies of reception

Abstract

ABSTRACT How can the instrumentalised understanding of literature, implied in bibliotherapy, better reconcile itself to the subjectivities of text and reader? This article proposes that clearer acknowledgement of reader agency enables more nuanced approaches within bibliotherapy. This demands a stronger alliance between bibliotherapy scholarship and naturalistic reader reception. By researching everyday readers, and how they perceive the importance of their reading, scholars gain better insight into reading as an ­agentive, eudaimonic practice. Predominating experimentalist approaches inadequately capture the subjectivities of reader experience and identity. While bibliotherapy remains connected to such instrumentalist understandings, it is also used referring to everyday practices of ‘reading for well-being’, leading to semantic incertitude. To better recapture the agency of the reader, and reading’s aesthetic-cultural dimension, this article proposes that bibliotherapy (i) pay closer heed to the naturalistic scholarship on reader experience, such as bibliomemoir, and (ii) address ongoing confusion surrounding the use of the term itself.