| Summary: | This Master’s thesis is connected to an interdisciplinary field between humanities and health care; “humanistic medicine” or “humanistic nursing”. The object of the investigation is nursing students’ experiences of reading fiction and autobiographies as course literature. In semi-structured interviews a group of students talk about their reading. A central issue is whether there is a difference in the way the students describe their reading of fiction during the nursing programme compared with their statements about their reading of other more scientific texts. Another question is if reading of fiction and autobiographies makes it possible for nursing students to develop compassion and empathy and if this has any impact, in the students’ opinion, on their future meetings with patients? According to Nussbaum and Rosenblatt the reading of fiction, especially novels, provides readers with the opportunity to identify and sympathize with narrative characters. These abilities could help the reader to understand the needs and aspirations of other human beings. The theoretical framework in the analysis of the interviews is based upon Nussbaum’s and Rosenblatt’s theories concerning the reader-text relation. The result of the investigation is that it is possible to understand nursing students’ explanations about what the reading of this special fictional course literature means to them in correlation with these theories. Reading fiction during nurse training gives insight and knowledge about individual experiences of illness and can, according to the informants, be a help in understanding future patients.
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