Project information
LEA! Reading communities, shaping identities (LEA!)

The aim of this project is to examen how the act of reading, and more precisely the act of reading literary texts, can bring people together. In literary theory the idea of ‘interpretive communities’ has been formulated. An ‘interpretive community’ can be recognized by the fact that people read in the same way the same texts. Community building is not an easy item, and it isa crucial problem in a globalized world in which different communities come together, live next to each other, sometimes close to each other, sometimes not, and claim their differences, on cultural, social, ethnic and so more level. During the pandemic crisis we’ve been living through these two past years, we have experienced not only our utter vulnerability but also how building solid human communities, and solidarity between humans, has become an absolute necessity. In the context of the French speaking world, the community is linked in a negative way, to what the French language names communautarisme. Communautarism is the negative pole of community thinking. People throw back on themselves, communities are organized by a logic of exclusion while inclusion and constructive community building should be the objective. The starting hypothesis of this project is that both the positive side – bring people together, make clear that we live in the same world, on the same planet – and the negative side – ‘my’ community is not yours, ‘my’ community excludes ‘your’ community – are both present when the reading of texts, and more specially of literary texts is studied. Therefore, we want to use the concept of the ‘interpretive community’ as a necessary tool to bridge the gap between community and communautarism in our contemporary European world. The idea is to study the uses of literary text – how do we read them, how do we discuss the readings of literature when we speak about ourselves and ‘our’ community? – in the context of community building. One could say that we are trying to formulate an ecology of literary reading, for social uses. Tell we how you read, and what do you read, and we will have better perception of who you are.
This project aims to develop knowledge and tools to answer these questions that classic theories of literature do not always consider how people read, what they read and why they read, and why the act of reading is also in certain way an act of writing.