Reading practice as the experience of involvement

The paper discusses the reading practice and its distinct feature that is the involvement or capture. Several theories revealing the specific experience of the perception of art are analyzed. The relationship between art and affect problematized by Aristotle in Poetics was considered by L.S. Vygotsky, who reviewed the affect and emotional perception of art from the viewpoint of psychology. Phenomenology represents the theory of aesthetic experience as a special act of consciousness described by R. Ingarden in detail. The ontological perspective of H.-G. Gadamer shows the experience of art as a method of cognition; the involvement in this experience is arranged by the structure of the game and representation. According to H.-G. Gadamer, the affect as an involvement is the attraction to the truth of being. The formal method searches for new forms of art. Thus, V. Shklovsky proposes the technique of defamiliarization as a way of interrupting ordinary perception. All the theories examined identify the specific art experience characterized by involvement as a shifting attitude, detachment from everyday life, and absorption by meeting with something new.