Critical literary reading faces significant challenges in the digital era, including declining engagement, fragmented attention, and reduced interpretive depth. This paper introduces RELIA (Reflective and Empathetic Literary Reading with Artificial Intelligence), a hybrid collaborative system between humans and AI designed to support and enrich the literary reading experience. Drawing on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, Vygotsky’s concept of scaffolding, and Digital Humanities frameworks, RELIA operates within a distributed cognition paradigm that enhances—rather than replaces—human interpretive capacities. Its architecture integrates a user-centered interface, advanced natural language processing, human–AI interoperability protocols, and scalable data infrastructures. RELIA’s core innovation lies in an empathetic collaboration model that fosters both intellectual and emotional engagement through personalized dialogue with literary texts. Initial evaluations with university students show increased motivation, deeper comprehension, and higher-order critical thinking, suggesting that RELIA can serve as a resilient and ethical model for empathetic digital education. This contribution addresses key challenges in hybrid collaborative networks, including transparency, scalability, and trust, offering a transferable approach to AI-enhanced, human-centered learning across domains.