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Bibliotherapy—the use of books to facilitate the recovery of people in distress from an emotional disturbance—has a history of nurturing metacognition to achieve a cathartic expression by verbal and nonverbal means. The support of a community with shared traumatic experiences, such as incarceration, can help sustain the benefits of bibliotherapy. This exploratory qualitative research study is focuses on a digital book club consisting of men and women with criminal conviction histories (CCH), along with the ways in which a work of fiction could promote self-reflection and resilience necessary for self-rehabilitation. Post-Incarceration Syndrome (PICS) is the leading cause of recidivism among both males and females in the United States, many of whom may have other mental disorders as well. Among those with PICS, incarceration transcends a physical location and becomes a state of mind: mental incarceration. The study’s participants were people who had served over one year of time in a minimum- to maximum-security or federal prison, and who had agreed to participate in an optional four-week digital book club focused on a selected work of fiction. This study contributes to the body of literature surrounding self-rehabilitation and social change by informing administrators, faculty, and staff involved in correctional education that a digital book club could be a viable means of self-empowerment for a person with a CCH, post-incarceration.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Not available / text

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-06, page: 2512. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-118).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, August, 2003. / Only copy of compact disc received located in Spec. Coll. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 405-420).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-118).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-118).

A whole class of people is largely missing in contemporary Anglophone literary studies: readers. This dissertation argues that readers matter to our understanding of literature and merit study as an independent object of analysis. I make the case for the value of studying readers through ethnographic analysis of reading communities across four contemporary organizations that claim to use literary reading and discussion for a particular social end. Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) is an alternative-sentencing program that claims to use literary reading and discussion to reform criminal offenders. Reflection Point is a professional training organization that claims to use literary reading and discussion to improve workplace productivity. The Reader is a charitable organization that claims to use literary reading and discussion to support people’s mental health. And Reese’s Book Club (RBC) is a media company that claims to use literary reading and discussion to empower women. By studying these communities of readers — by analyzing, as I call it, “literature in action” — we develop a clearer picture of literature as a social object. Neither, in absolute terms, autonomously resistant nor instrumentally reducible, literary texts are material forms with context-dependent yet medium-specific effects that are activated in particular contexts of reception. Literature is not simply whatever people do with it. However, at a time when literary scholars are making claims for the social value of literary forms even as “serious” literary reading seems to be becoming ever-more socially marginal, it is important to develop an understanding of how literature has effects and how literature is valued by readers now, if we are to make more substantiated claims about its social status and function. Through ethnographic research of these four reading communities, I show how readers — engaging with an aesthetically and generically broad range of literary texts — put literature to use in ways that diverge from the stated aims of their organizations and that complicate common assumptions about literature’s social value.