Dreams of emotional continuity: Reading and relating in Malous bokklubb

Abstract

Presently, there is an abundance of sites, across media, promoting acts of communal reading (televised book clubs, webrings, publishers’ book discussion questions, etc.). This article forms a case-study of what usages of reading and concurrently what reading subjects are framed in the Swedish televised book club, Malous bokklubb, modeled on Oprah’s Book Club in the U.S. and Richard & Judy’s Book Club in the U.K. The main reading protocol underwritten by various textual fields in the show is the one of rich emotional continuity between the reading subject and its textual others. The show partakes in a middlebrow “women’s culture” whose main message is that women, across differences, have something in common, and that the stories of almost any other’s can be used to work on the self.