82.09:929 Harding D. W. 
DENYS WYATT HARDING ON ENTERTAINMENT AND ON READING 
Meta Grosman 
Entertainment and the process of reading are two spheres of human 
activity which have kept Professor Harding's interest for more than forty 
years. Time and again he would focus his attention on them: studying the 
nature of these activities, their relation to other human activities, their 
impact upon the individual and their role in society as a whole, and exa­
mining individual features of the reading process, analysing various miscon­
ceived notions about the nature and position of these activities in human 
life and investigating the possibilities of improving the capacity to respond 
t!o art at a more practiced level. In this way - approaching the problems of 
entertainment and reader response from different points of view and elabo­
rating various details and aspects over several decades - his sustained 
efforts to penetrate into these activities have resul.ted in an important body 
of knowledge encompassing a far-reaching concept of entertainment and 
of reading built upon a well-balanced account of them as integral human 
activities, and of their wider social relevance. 
Sometimes succinctly characterized as cultural pursuits, these two 
activities certainly fall into the category of the most complex forms of 
human behaviour in civilized societies, and are, accordingly, notoriously 
hard to study systematically or to examine experimentally. Because of this 
they have been subject to rather vague assumptions and predominantly 
metaphorical descriptions. Up till now studies in this field seem to have 
passed quite untouched by the fast development characteristic of so much 
psychological thought and experimentation in some other spheres of human 
behaviour. Thus Professor Harding's work has kept its original challenge 
of a profound and honest examination of a scarcely known and hard-to­
understand area of important human activities, still of nopical interest today. 
The purpose of this study is to present Harding's writings in the related 
fields of entertainment and the process of reading, especially the following 
of his studies whose interest centres on the two subjects which are, natu­
rally, referred to and discussed also in some of his other works: 
»Adult Education and Adult Entertainment<< (1934), 
»The Place of Entertainment in Social Life< < (1934), 
»How Do You Enjoy Yourself?<< (1934), 
»Some Views of Yours on Entertainment< < (1937) , 
»The Role of the Onlooker<< (1937), 
> > The Social Background of Taste in Music« (1938), 
69 

»The Social Background of Taste in Music II - Individual Growth 
in Taste« (1938), 
»Skills of Enjoyment« (1948), 
»Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction« (1962), 
»Reader and Author<< (1963), 
»The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment« (1967), 
>>Considered Experience: The Invitation of the Novel« (1967), 
>>Practice at Liking: A Study in Experimental Aesthetics« (1968), 
>>The Bond with the Author<< (1971). 
As it is obvious from the dates of publications, Professor Harding had 
treated the wider topic of entertainment before he turned to examine the 
narrower problem of the reading process; it had kept his attention - as 
a major preoccupation - for a shorter time than the process of reading. 
Apart from observing the chronological order of appearance, I will attempt 
no differentiation bet-ween the t-wo topics in this presentation. The reason 
for this decision lies in the fact that the treatment of these two activities 
is frequently intertwined in his studies, so that his studies of entertainment 
include all forms of the so-called display entertainment, film, drama, fiction, 
and his later studies of the reading process always cover the reading of 
both what would be categorized as serious literature and as subliterature, 
and regarded as entertainment. Thus most of his studies refer to both of 
these activities. Keeping in mind the problems of both activities, he seems 
to shift the central interest of his studies from the broader subject of 
entertainment to the narrower problems of the reading process, and to 
further details of the same. Along with this development we can follow a 
simultaneous everpresent interest in the possibilities of improving the capa­
city to respond to art, which eventually crystallizes to become the central 
preoccupation of some of his studies. 
ENTERTAINMENT 
>>Adult Education and Adult Entertainment« (1934)
1 
is Professor Hard­
ing's first attempt to outline some integral features of entertainment and 
to call attention to its important place in the economy of human interests. 
Currently accepted views disapproving of entertainment and simply sug­
gesting that it should be replaced by something else are neither responsible 
nor offer any sound basis for the improvement of entertainment. To develop 
entertainment as good as it might be, its new potential social function and 
value should be carefully examined. Professor Harding's study tries to 
furnish the first step towards this aim. To reveal its basic functions he 
first tries to analyse »the social situation« set up by entertainment: 
In films, plays, novels, jokes, popular songs and pictures, and in 
a large part of the newspapers it is clear that the entertainer is 
describing or presenting what he takes to be interesting situations 
in what he takes to be an appropriate light. He expects his audience to 
agree that the situation is interesting and the attitude taken up towards 
' »Adult Education and Adult Entertainment«. Adult Education, Vol. 7, Part 1 
(September 1934): 18-24. 
70 

it appropriate; - implicitly he is asking for their sanction for his 
interests and evaluations. . . . There occurs between the public and 
its entertainers a reciprocal sanctioning and reinforcement of each 
other's interests, ideals, desires and attitudes; the sanctioning, broadly, 
of the community's emotional life, and thus, indirectly, of its conduct 
and morality. Let me make the people's films and I care not who 
makes their laws.
2 
The prominence of social communication and sanctioning in mass cir­
cumstances accounts for the powerful influence of much entertainment upon 
the public. Its effects, i.e. its setting »the tone of popular emotional response 
and therefore the subtler points of everyday conduct« is even stronger 
because the human capacity for feeling and evaluation is largely neglected 
in a system of education primarily concerned with the acquisition or impro­
vement of skills, increase of knowledge, and improved capacity for thinking, 
thus leaving a gap which is readily filled by popular entertainment. Its pe­
netrating influence can be understood by analogy with our daily experience 
with our friends and fellow-men, which in the form of daily gossip and 
conversation comes to form our emotional attitudes and our expectations 
in much the same way as entertainment. A friend telling us what he saw 
last night is doing essentially what novelists, playwrights, journalists, comic 
songsters, and film industries are doing: >>He is presenting, more vividly or 
less, some of what he considers the more interesting possibilities of living, 
presenting them in what he regards an appropriate light, and expecting you 
to sanction these interests and attitudes by forming a responsive and sym­
pathetic audience.<<
3 
Entertainment is thus seen basically as a heightened form of such 
emotional exercise and »education<< and as continuous with other social 
experience and not as separate or different from it. Because of its important 
influence it should be carefully studied together with the possibilities of 
its improvement. 
Professor Harding's next study, »The Place of Entertainment in Social 
Life<< (1934),
4 
is his most complex statement of the problems concerning 
entertainment, some of which will be examined in more detail in his later 
writings. The explicit purpose of his preliminary discussion is to try to 
clarify some uncertain notions about psychological mechanisms involved 
in entertainment. His analysis first centres on the inadequacy of the con­
temporaneous notion that spectators of entertainment are passive and 
experience vicarious satisfaction suggested by daydreams and fantasy wish­
fulfilment based on identification with performers. Such a theory of vica­
rious satisfaction assuming »that there occurs in the spectator an un­
conscious identification of himself with the performer, so that the impulses 
he supposes the performer to be satisfying are also satisfied in him<<,
5 
Harding says, »must mean that the spectator is in an abnormal social rela­
tionship with the performer and fails to treat him as someone other than 
himself«. Though it is hard to prove or disprove such an identification, the 
claim that it always occurs, together with vicarious satisfaction, or that 
' Ibid., p. 20. 
' Ibid., p. 23. 
' »The Place of Entertainment in Social Life.« The Sociological Review, 
Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1934): 393-406. 
5 
Ibid., p. 395. 
71 

it constitutes the normal mechanism of entertainment, is certainly exagge­
rated. Taken literally, it could lead to the conclusion that any admiration of, 
or respectful attention to, other people comes about because we are iden­
tified with them or gain vicarious satisfaction from their activities. A more 
tenable solution is suggested: we enjoy seeing other people do things that 
we would enjoy doing ourselves simply because »We possess an ill-defined 
sentiment of liking for other human beings as such«.
6 
Our social relationship 
with an entertainer can accordingly be viewed as not essentially different 
from our relations with other people in many ordinary life situations. 
though the activity we watch in entertainment is of a more exciting kind 
and the position we occupy in watching is peculiar: 
The peculiarity of the entertainment situation and of those like 
it is that we remain in the position of spectators without becoming 
»practically« involved. Such situations, however, in spite of our 
seeming passivity, are not without importance, since the interest 
we feel and the attitude we take up are inevitably contributing in 
some degree to the organization of our emotional life. To wipe out, 
supposing it possible, the effects of all the occasions on which a man 
was merely a spectator would be profoundly to alter his whole 
character and cultural status.' 
The related ideas of vicarious satisfaction, identification, and wish-fulfil­
ment are most frequently applied to novels, plays and films, which represent 
entertainment of greater practical importance. They are in particular applied 
to what is regarded as inferior entertainment and not to serious literature, 
though such differentiation certainly seems untenable from the reader's 
point of view, since serious literature also provides the reader with cha· 
racters whom he may sympathize with. If entertainment is regarded as 
being »essentially a matter of sociable communication, and continuous in 
function and process not with daydreaming but with gossip«,
8 
it is possible 
to see how the represented situation is »lived through« without the occur­
rence of identification and vicarious experience: 
»Although we are not identified with any one of the characters in 
a play or novel we are nevertheless held in an imagined social 
relationship with them all, as if we were invisible and impotent 
spectators among them. In this way we may experience intense 
feeling ... «' 
If the view that gossip and representational entertainment fulfil the 
same function is tentatively accepted, preliminary speculations about such 
functions become possible. Besides relieving us of the muddle of >>real life« 
and the fluctuations and inhibitions produced by actual events, 
72 
it seems that both gossip and entertainment have the function of 
reminding us of the more interesting possibilities of living, and of 
convincing us that important things do happen to the sort of people 
in whom we have a social interest .... they represent events in such 
' Ibid., p. 396. 
7 
Ibid., p. 397. 
' Ibid., p. 399. 
' Ibid., p. 399. 

a way that we remain in the position of a spectator, not involved 
except so far as our interest in human activity as such involves us. 
In spite of our emotional response we cannot be called upon to take 
part.'• 
The unreality of the situations shown in entertainment presents no problen:i 
to the spectator who knows that the events of a film or novel are unreal 
in the sense that they never happened. In spite of this they can »draw 
attention to certain real possibilities of human life and feeling« and because 
of this »the unreality of situations represented is likely to be of small 
importance compared with the reality of the communication they make 
possible«.
11 
The spectator's and reader's primary concern lies with the 
interesting human possibilities which the fiction allows the entertainer to 
bring up and comment on. And accordingly they respond to what they re­
cognize >>more or less consciously to be a social presentation of events and 
not to events themselves«.12 Only a very naive audience or small children 
fail to recognize this fact. 
The tendency to view entertainment as »escape<< occurring by means 
of the fantasy process fails to recognize that the process of being enter­
tained is not itself the same as daydreaming. The possibility that it may 
stimulate the latter does not change this basic fact and Professor Harding 
emphasizes that entertainment is an escape only in the way in which any 
interesting activity may be an escape from some other activity; similarly, 
one »forgets oneself« only in the way one does this in any interesting pur­
suit. So Professor Harding concludes that »entertainment as such is a normal 
human activity which, like gossip or music or politics, may be given varying 
prominence, and may attain different degrees of excellence, in different 
cultures«.l
3 
However, a more precise analysis of the complex interests, senti­
ments and attitudes that it reflects will only be possible when actual enter­
tainment has been examined in more detail. 
To gather facts which would facilitate a serious investigation of enter­
tainment and its functions, Professor Harding addressed sixteen questions 
to the readers of The Highway in his article »How Do You Enjoy Yourself« 
(1934).
14 
The questions are geared primarily towards revealing the various 
attitudes to entertainment, the ways in which entertainment is obtained, the 
value placed on it, the functions attributed to it, or rather the effects as 
experienced by its consumers. That is why the readers of The Highway are 
explicitly asked »to give the information spontaneously«, to say »What the 
facts are«, rather than what they feel they ought to be. Opinion could be 
added too, but the facts and opinion should be kept separate. 
Professor Harding's analysis of the answers sent by over two hundred 
people appeared as >>Some Views of Yours on Entertainment« in the April 
1937 issue of The Highway.
15 
It covers only a small part of the materials 
gathered, above all >>the question of what kind of value people place on 
10 
Ibid., pp. 400-1. 
" Ibid., p. 401. 
" Ibid., p. 402. 
'' Ibid., p. 404. 
14 
>>How Do You Enjoy Yourself?« The Highway, Vol. 27 (November 1934): 
38-39. 
" >>Some Views Of Yours on Entertainment.« The Highway, Vol. 29 (April 
1937): 180-82. 
73 

entertainment - whether, for instance, it is a positive good, or a consolation 
to be tolerated, or an injurious drug<<.
16 
A large portion of respondents held 
»what can be called the medicine view, that is, they were inclined to regard 
entertainment as justified not by the direct satisfaction it gives, but by the 
contribution it makes to some other aspect of their lives«,l? irrespective of 
whether they would describe it as a consolation for the less pleasant parts 
of life or speak about its quality and quantity in terms of its compensatory, 
medicinal, or doping function. Such answers, Professor Harding explains, 
tend to overlook the direct pleasure derived from entertainment, without 
which it could hardly have the desired effects: 
»In judging the significance of this kind of attitude towards enter· 
tainment we have to bear in mind that the medicinal function can 
never be the whole story: entertainment could never be a successful 
tonic or anodyne unless it were a direct pleasure in itself. None ot 
my correspondents . . . suggests that entertainment is a bitter medi­
cine .... there must be many who value it far more for its direct 
pleasure than they want to realize.«" 
Also some other answers, for instance that it is better to have small 
doses of entertainment than big ones, obviously reflect the commonly ac­
cepted view that entertainment is less worthy than work or education or 
enjoyment of the arts. Along with uncertain notions, popular opinion about 
entertainment thus seems to share also a rather puritanical attitude to such 
activities, as is characteristic also of the more critical discussions of them. 
FROM ENTERTAINMENT TO THE PROCESS OF READING 
>>The Role of the Onlooker«,
19 
published in the same year as »Some 
Views of Yours on Entertainment«, moves in its central interest from enter­
tainment in general to the representational entertainment of film, drama, 
and in particular of fiction. This shift, anticipated with the emphasis laid 
upon the importance of representational entertainment already in »The 
Place of Entertainment in Social Life«, may be said to represent a further 
development from a general to a more specialized interest in Harding's 
writings. Such explanation seems probable since we can trace a similar 
tendency to turn to the discussion of more specialized problems also in 
Professor Harding's contemporaneous studies of the possibilities of acquiring 
and improving the skills of enjoyment in arts. The wider topic of enter­
tainment, especially of its important formative influence upon man, of 
course, is never lost sight of in his later writings, which proceed from 
unchanged premises. 
Written for the different readership of Scrutiny »The Role of the On­
looker« sets out to describe in detail the activity of the spectator and 
" Ibid., p. 180. The other topic discussed is the place of sex in entertainment. 
Some of the gathered materials were used for his later »The Notion of 'Escape' 
in Fiction and Entertainment«. Cf. note 45 for bibliographic details. 
" Ibid., p. 180. 
" Ibid., p. 180. 
19 
»The Role of the Onlooker.« Scrutiny, VI (1937): 247-58. 
74 

reader.
20 
It is an attempt to answer the questions which the novel reader 
or playgoer »Who knows well enough that he at least is not indulging in 
escape, that he is not passive, that he enjoys no vicarious satisfaction«
21 
may find himself wondering about when he wants to know what he is doing 
in reading, what is the nature of his activity and of the imaginative response 
he is making. 
To discuss »the part played by the spectator or reader, what is the 
nature of his response? What mode of activity is he engaged in? Or, to put 
it differently, with what other modes of activity do we tacitly contrast his 
Response?« Professor Harding first outlines four modes of activity. These 
four modes - the operational relationship to objects and events in which 
things are actually done, the intellectual comprehension of things and 
events around us, simple enjoyment of experience at perceptual level, and 
the response of detached evaluation - can be differentiated even though 
they only seldom appear in isolation. Professor Harding points out that once 
the value judgement is made, that is, once the spectator assesses the event 
in the light of his interests, desires, sentiments and ideals and feels it to 
be noteworthy, commonplace, agreeable or disagreeable, tragic, funny, con­
temptible or heroic, his relationship to the event has gone beyond mere 
comprehension. 
He next examines the role of the onlooker watching actual events of 
interest to him because they disclose or make more vivid to him >>Certain 
of the possibilities of his surroundings«. The daily activity of looking at 
various events affects the onlooker and his expectations, hopes and anxieties 
in proportion to two factors: the sentiment that binds him to the parti­
cipant and the importance that he attributes to the event in the light of his 
own values. Such a detached looking at events which includes an evaluation 
exercises a great formative influence on the onlooker. Watched without 
personal involvement the events are viewed in a more distant perspective 
and related to a more extensive system of information, beliefs and values. 
Because of this the detached evaluative response tends to be more widely 
comprehensive and comes to have 
the utmost importance in building up, confirming and modifying 
all but the very simplest of our values. It is as onlookers from a 
distance that we can most readily endure the penetration of general 
principles among our sentiments." 
In this way the events we view fron1 a distance, without any direct opera­
tive response, come to have a profound influence upon us: 
20 
The importance of a detailed and precise description of an activity before 
we can begin to understand it is described in his study >>Varieties of Work and 
Leisure,<< Journal of Occupational Psychology, No. 12 (Spring 1938), p. 114: >>To 
understand a piece of activity (necessarily in reference to a particular individual) 
we need to discuss the direct satisfaction it offers; its indirect incentives and 
their vividness; its psychological cost; the degree of concentration it demands 
(its exigence); its 'difficulty' (the degree to which it lies within or beyond the 
individual's present skills or insight); and, finally, whether it is agreeable or 
disagreeable.« 
" »The Role of the Onlooker«, p. 247. 
'" Ibid., p. 252. 
75 

The event we look on at from a distance affects us, but it is set 
in a wider context than the urgencies of participating relationships 
usually permit us to call up around events. And for this reason, if 
we could obliterate the effects on a man of all the occasions when 
he was 'merely a spectator' it would be profoundly to alter his character 
and outlook." 
Thus the viewer's future expectations are formed and so are his beliefs of 
what is >>the kind of thing that does happen« and what is natural and what 
is not established. This process of cultural moulding is in effect while every­
thing we look at is also treated as an object lesson by our fellow spectators 
sanctioning or withdrawing the sanction of our feelings about the events. 
In this respect the experience represented symbolically, in language, 
opens up even more interesting possibilities than the direct experience of 
our surroundings. We can represent to ourselves actual experiences of our 
past, or transfer to ourselves things that have happened to others, and 
imagine also physically impossible happenings. When the possibilities of 
experience are no longer represented privately but communicated we pass 
to cooperative make-believe play of children and to gossip. In gossip various 
possibilities of experience are communicated and evaluated. The roles of 
»entertainer<< and audience are differentiated and can also be passed back­
wards and forwards from one person to another, while the audience's atti­
tude of agreement or disagreement may be expressed directly to the speaker. 
The most important feature of gossip is the implied attitude of the speaker 
coming to expression in his control of the directedness of his statement. 
But the essential fact in gossip as in entertainment is that the 
speaker who raises a topic is presenting what he takes to be an 
interesting situation - actual or possible - in what he regards as 
an appropriate light. He expects his hearers to agree on the interest 
of the situation and the fittingness of his attitude' whether it be the 
hushed fascination with which he talks of cancer or his truculent 
satisfaction at the nation's increased armament." 
From this description of gossip Professor Harding takes only one step to 
come to the representational art of the writer and film producer: 
The playwright, the novelist, the song-writer and the film-producing 
team are all doing the same thing as the gossip, however innocent 
they may be of witting propagandist intentions. Each invites his 
audience to agree that the experience he portrays is possible and 
interesting, and that his attitude to it, implicit in his portrayal, is 
fitting. In the less developed levels of entertainment the process is 
chiefly one of reinforcing commonplace values in a trivially varied 
array of situations. In the representational arts, most obviously in 
literature, the author invites his audience to share in exploration, 
an extension and refinement, of his and their common interests; and, 
as a corollary, to refine or modify their value judgments." 
On the basis of his considerations Professor Harding makes it obvious 
that attempts at over-simple statements of the difference between »art<< and 
»entertainment<< should be discouraged, since neither of them forms a homo-
76 
23 
Ibid., p. 253. 
'
4 
Ibid., p. 257. 
25 
Ibid., p. 258. 

geneous category of quite the kind it is sometimes supposed to. Such chal­
lenging questions as whether our taste in gossip is the same kind of thing 
or not as our taste in films and trivial fiction, and whether the latter is 
continuous or not with our taste in literature, demand further examination. 
So do the notions of passivity and activity of vicarious satisfaction and of 
escape. 
It is these last-mentioned concepts that arc in the focus of »Psychological 
Processes in the Reading of Fiction«
26 
(1962). Thus Professor Harding turns 
to further examination of the reading process only twenty-five years after 
the publication of »The Role of the Onlooker<<, a time marked by the publi­
cation of his two books on social psychology and numerous studies in diverse 
fieldsP Though the basic premises remain unchanged, the presentation of 
and the emphasis on individual elements are different, and his detailed exa­
mination of the psychological concepts usually used in the discussion of the 
reading process - passivity, identification and vicarious satisfaction - offers 
challenging conclusions revealing their fundamental inadequacy. 
Agreeing vith those who maintain >>that the numerous and extremely 
dissimilar activities conventionally grouped together as the arts don't form 
a separate psychological category<<, Professor Harding decides not to discuss 
fiction within the framework of general aesthetics. He decides on such an 
approach not only because he is of the opinion that very few literal state­
ments applying to a novel, a landscape painting, a porcelain dish and a piece 
of music are at all illuminating about any one of those things, but because 
he is persuaded that the very nature of fiction merits and justifies a different 
examination: 
A novel is so distantly related to many other sorts of art, and so 
closely related to activities that are not included among the arts, 
that an approach through aesthetic generalizations would be restricting 
and misleading. It may seem, perhaps, that the form of a novel and 
the style of a novelist can be discussed in terms equally applicable 
to other arts, but I suspect that it can be done only by substituting 
metaphor and analogy for literal statement." 
Persuaded that >>more important aspects of fiction are illuminated if the 
reader of a novel is compared with the man who hears about other people 
and their doings in the course of ordinary gossip<<, Professor Harding propo­
ses to view >>the reading of a novel as a process of looking on at a representa­
tion of imagined events, or rather, of listening to a description of them.«
29 
His outline of the necessary premises taken from his previous work redefines 
the importance of the time spent in looking on at events in a non-participant 
evaluative relation. Stronger emphasis is laid on the elements of fantasy; 
however, its relatedness to the real needs is always kept in mind, since 
forms of fantasy >>give expression to perfectly real preoccupations, fears and 
desires, however impossible the imagined events embodying them<<.
30 
Espe­
cially the possibility of things that might happen, encountered at its simplest 
" >>Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction.<< British Journal of 
Aesthetics, Vol. 2 (April 1962): 133-47. 
27 
For details consult >>Bibliography of D. W. Harding's Works<< in Acta 
Neophilologica, XV (1982), pp. 86-90. 
" >>Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction«, pp. 133-4. 
" Ibid., p. 134. 
'' Ibid., p. 136. 
77 

in the child's »Suppose ... « technique, brings about »a vast extension of the 
range of possible human experience that can be offered socially for con­
templation and asscssment«.
31 
Like a great deal of gossip and everyday nar­
rative, fiction and drama - irrespective of whether they are true or fic­
tional - basically »invite us to be onlookers joining in the evaluation of 
some possibility of experience«.
32 
The use of fantasy only makes it more 
evident that fiction is a convention of communication: an accepted technique 
for discussing the chances of life, a convention for enlarging the scope of 
the discussion we have with each other about what may befall. As a conse­
quence of this, full grasp of fiction as fiction is a sophisticated achievement, 
only gradually attained by children and sometimes not fully mastered by 
the less sophisticated adult. Though not in the position to answer back, the 
reader is still active in such a discussion by accepting or rejecting what the 
author assesses in terms of possible events and suggests as an appropriate 
attitude. Though the reader may not consciously formulate his agreement 
or disagreement, his discriminations come to expression in his enthusiasm 
for an author's work or disappointment with it. 
In the second part of his study Professor Harding proceeds to describe 
in detail the reader's active part in his reception of fiction, and to show why 
the concepts of identification and vicarious satisfaction, implying the reader's 
passivity, are inadequate. 
Here again the emphasis is laid on the process of imagining which 
forms the basic connection between the onlooker and the reader and a real 
or an unreal event: 
The fundamental fact is that we can imagine ourselves in a situation 
very different from the one we are in, we can create images of the 
sensations we should have, we can become aware, in part, of the 
meanings we should see in it, what our intentions, attitudes and 
emotions would be, what satisfactions and frustrations we should 
experience." 
The same basic process of imagining is at work when, looking out of the 
window, you imagine yourself out in the rain with every possible sensation 
of such a situation, when you see a man walking in the rain and, assuming 
a fundamental likeness between yourself and him, have an imaginative or 
emphatic insight into his experience, or when you watch a film of a man 
in such a situation, or read of him in a novel. 
The reader's imaginative insight into characters may take different 
forms and be accompanied by various attitudes: 
78 
The reader may see resemblances between himself and a fictional 
persona only to regret them (and perhaps hope to become different); 
is this recognition of resemblance 'identification'? He may long en­
viously to be like a fictional character so different from himself that 
he discounts all possibility of approximating to him; is this admiration 
'identification'? He may adopt the character as a model for imitation, 
more or less close and successful, and it may be this process to which 
'identification' refers. Or he may be given up, for the duration or the 
novel or film, to absorbed empathy with one of the characters .... 
'
1 
Ibid., p. 138. 
" Ibid., p. 138. 
" Ibid., p. 140. 

The onlooker's observation of other people or of personae in fic­
tion and drama may be accompanied by a preference for some, by 
specially sensitive or full insight into some, by awareness of likenesses 
between himself and some (not necessarily those he admires), and by 
a wish that he resembled some. These processes, occurring with all 
degrees of clear awareness or obscurity, form part of the tissue of 
ordinary social intercourse as well as entering into the enjoyment of 
fiction." 
Professor Hardning makes it clear that the use of the term 'identification' 
tells us nothing about the rich variety of the possibilities of the reader's 
attitude to fictional characters. Instead of revealing »the perfectly usual and 
healthy process of having emphatic insight into other people or representa­
tions of them«, it may even suggest that there is something pathological 
about such processes approximating the psychotic delusion of' identity with 
a great man. All such uncertainty can be avoided if we describe each of the 
processes accurately by speaking explicitly of empathy, imitation, admiration, 
or recognition of similarities. An adequate account of a reader's attitude to 
fictional personae should do justice to the complexity of the reading process 
by identifying its precise elements, rather than lump them all together as 
'identification' with the characters. 
The idea of vicarious satisfaction, commonly used with the suggestion 
that the spectator or reader who gives himself up to absorbed sympathy 
with some character of a novel or a play experiences vicariously whatever 
the character undergoes, also cannot bear Harding's critical examination. 
Examining its literal meanings, he makes it clear that the spectator's desires 
are not in fact satisfied. So the only implied meaning of this term could be 
»that viewing a film or reading a novel approximates to having a wish­
fulfilment dream ... and that the spectator temporarily gets a delusive satis­
faction through what amounts to hallucination while he reads or watches.«
35 
Though something like this may happen to a few rather unusual people, it 
is unbelievable as the usual mechanism of reading a novel or viewing a film 
in which the spectators normally do not suppose themselves actually to be 
in some world of their fantasy similar to the condition of the opium smokers 
in a dream. Taking the metaphor of vicarious satisfaction literally obviously 
does not pay the necessary attention to the extent of pathological disorienta­
tion implied by such supposed to the extent of pathological disorientation 
implied by such supposed psychological process. 
Professor Harding's own analysis proceeds from the assumption that 
the wish-fulfilment represents also »a statement of a pressing need or desire, 
defining the desire at the same time as it offers hallucinated satisfaction«.3
6 
Expressing interests and affirming desires for which ordinary life provides 
small scope, fiction and drama may come to have a similar function at least 
for some spectators and readers. In this sense it is not right to say that 
plays and novels give substitute satisfaction to the spectators' desires; they 
rather offer »perfectly real, direct satisfaction, but to a muted and incom­
plete version of their desires«
37 
like many other verbal actions expressing 
their attitudes. For some spectators they may have a function similar to 
" Ibid., pp. 141-2. 
'' Ibid., p. 142. 
" Ibid., p. 143. 
·" Ibid., p. 143. 
79 

a safety-valve, in some they may precipitate overt action to satisfy desire, 
and in others, they may be a sufficient and direct satisfaction of the slight 
degree of interest and desire which they elicit or release. 
Giving expression to such desires and interests, fiction and drama make 
it possible for spectators to join in their expression and gain importantly in 
»having joined with the novelist or dramatist in the psychological act of 
giving them (i.e. such desires) statement in a social setting«.
38 
What is called 
wish-fulfilment in novels and plays should therefore more correctly be de­
scribed as wish-formulation or the definition of desires and viewed as an 
important social act, which, though possible at various levels, involves all 
of them in the same process of >>affirming with the author a set of values«. 
Fiction can thus be seen as contributing to the definition of the reader's and 
spectator's values, stimulating his desires rather than gratifying them by 
some mechanism of vicarious satisfaction, and its importance in the social 
moulding of readers becomes understandable. It enables the reader to enter 
imaginatively into the experience of other people: 
Emphatic insight allows the spectator to view ways of life beyond his 
own range. Contemplating exceptional people, he can achieve an imagi­
nary development of human potentialities that have remained rudi­
mentary in himself or been truncated after brief growth; he can believe 
that he enters into some part of the experience of the interplanetary 
explorer ... The spectator enters imaginatively, with more or less ac­
curacy and fullness, into some of the multifarious possibilities of life 
that he has not himself been able to achieve. One of the bonds 
between ourselves and others, one of our interests in them, is that 
they have done things that we have not. A great deal of gossip, news­
paper reports, memoirs, fiction and drama, serves to remind us of 
the human potentialities that for one reason or another we have left 
to others, but the knowledge of which, in a diversified group with 
highly developed modes of communication, forms one of our social 
possessions." 
Our satisfaction in entering imaginatively into fictional experience beyond 
our own range derives also from the fact >>that we can see in very diverse 
ways of life certain broad types of experience that we know in our own«, 
from the possibility of simply familiar experience to the heightening context 
of more remarkable ways of life, through which the ordinary possibilities 
may gain an enhanced significance. However, we must never forget the basic 
fact that the process of looking on and entering imaginatively into other 
people's activity, or representation of it, does not enlarge the range of the 
onlooker's experience, but rather of his quasi-experience and partial under­
standing. >>For it has to be remembered that the subtlest and most intense 
emphatic insight into the experience of another person is something far 
different from having the experience oneself.«
40 
The use of the terms >>identification« and >>Vicarious satisfaction« additio­
nally cannot describe the process of reading so as to give an adequate account 
of what happens in it. The reader not only feels simply what he imagines 
the character to be feeling, but also feels, as the onlooker, for him and 
responds to the fictional situation as a whole. The onlooker's response to 
80 
" Ibid., p. 144. 
" Ibid., pp. 144-5. 
" Ibid., p. 145. 

the represented characters and events thus goes beyond identification with 
any one of the characters; he feels for them as well as with them and, as 
a rule, knows more about the events than the characters are shown as know­
ing. Rereading a novel or rewitnessing a play can prove the reader's su­
periority of knowledge beyond doubt. 
The more critical reader also knows that the characters of a novel or 
a play are not real people »but only personae created by the author for the 
purpose of communication<<. He is aware of the fact that he is »in a social 
communication of a special sort with the author<< and never forgets that the 
fictional characters are »Only part of a convention by which the author 
discusses, and proposes an evaluation of, possible human experience<<.
41 
Some elements of the process of reading and their importance for the 
reader are discussed again in >>Considered Experience: The Invitation of the 
Novel<< (1967).
42 
In this study Professor Harding approaches the problem of 
the reluctant reader by outlining the kinds of challenge and threat that the 
willing reader of fiction can expect and the non-reader sacrifices or escapes. 
Proceeding from his belief that the possible continuity between day­
dreams and fiction should be viewed as wish-formulation or definition in 
which wishes are stated and their fulfilment contemplated in imagination, 
he argues that love stories and adventure stories can offer partial expression 
and partial control of the wilder fantasies stimulated for instance by ado­
lescent sex interests and by adolescent aggressiveness. The contemplated 
possibilities need not all be pleasant; fear-formulation may be as important 
as wish-formulation, since it may provide a parallel to the child's own 
anxiety and then demonstrate that even such imaginary peril can be over­
come. Fiction can also give enhanced significance to the reader's own life 
by analogy with the events of the novel or play, thereby imparting unreal 
glamour to rather ordinary events, or providing a heightened reinterpretation 
of everyday events for some young readers. At the stage of adolescence, it 
can also contribute to the reader's search for identity or role definition, 
since it may allow the reader »to try on various personalities, each of which 
selectively emphasizes some feature or potentiality of your developing self<<.
43 
Besides empathising with characters, young readers may come to evaluate 
what they do and suffer, and, at least in some measure, also to accept or 
reject implicitly the values suggested by the author, by his interests and 
attitudes. 
The reader's interest in fiction seems to be related to his interest in 
other people, his wish to follow their doings, to try to understand their 
motives and to join with someone else in making an emotional response to 
their supposed behaviour and experience. Whereas the well-adjusted readers 
feeling no particular interest in fiction are likely to become interested in 
it when they come across something puzzling or disturbing in the social life 
around them, the person with rudimentary social interest is not likely ever 
to find much appeal in fiction.
44 
" Ibid., p. 147. 
42 
»Considered Experience: The Invitation of the Novel.<< English in Education, 
Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1967): 7-15. 
43 
Ibid., p. 9. 
44 
Cf. ibid., p. 15. 
G Acta 81 

>>The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment<< (1967)
45 
examines 
the possible meanings which the terms »escape« and »escapist<< may yield 
when applied to the reading of literature and to the pursuit of entertainment. 
By a careful analysis of the various psychological processes involved in 
resorting to escape, or rather activities offering escape from some other 
activity, and by a detailed examination of the answers given by the respon­
dents to his questionnaire in the 1930,
46
, Professor Harding illuminates the 
complexity of the meaning of such terms, and in particular the variety of 
the attitudes taken to what is commonly named escape in fiction and enter­
tainment. In the light of his critical argument it becomes evident that such 
a derogatory notion of escape as »refuge from actual life<< as maintained 
by Q. D. Leavis in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), can serve as 
a mere label of disparagement without any precise critical meaning. Since 
people turn to reading and entertainment for various reasons: for their com­
pensatory appeal, either because they can provide temporary forgetfulness of 
the analgesic or because they offer positive remedial effect, and since under 
certain conditions and for certain reasons different kinds of literature, in­
cluding the literature of the highest quality, may fulfil the compensatory 
and consolatory function, escape may mean several things that should be 
differentiated rather than lumped together: 
Instead of uncovering any one psychological meaning for 'escape' I have 
reached three psychological processes one or more of which operates 
in activities that are commonly called escapist. They are, first, the 
change from one pursuit to another mainly for the compensatory appeal 
of the latter; second, the welcoming of regressive pursuits - those 
which fall below the person's own usual standards; and third, the 
manipulation of affect, pursuing an emotional state instead of starting 
from interest in a situation and accepting the emotional state to which 
exploration leads. This analysis implies that the material of entertain­
ment or literature (a particular novel or play, for instance) cannot be 
labelled 'escapist' regardless of the function it performs for a given 
person on a given occasion." 
In »Reader and Author<< (1963)
48 
and »The Bond with the Author<< (1971),
49 
Professor Harding takes up another aspect of the reading process, the obliga­
tions of the reader proceeding from the fact that, through reading, he is 
related not only to the text but also to its author. These two studies, in this 
sense, come to deal with the problems of communication. Starting from the 
fact that uncertainties of communication arise because the less conscious 
implications may not be the same for the reader as they were for the author, 
or for one reader and another, this study attempts an analysis of both: the 
'
5 
»The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment.<< The Oxford Review, 
No. 4 (February 1967): 23-32. 
46 
Cf. notes 14 and 15 for bibliographic details. 
47 
»The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment<<, p. 32. 
" »Reader and Author<< in Experience into Words: Essays on Poetry. (1963) 
London: Chatto and Windus; pp. 163-174. Harding's awareness of this problem 
can be ascertained as early as 1936. In a comment entitled »Psychology and Cri­
ticism: A Comment<<, Scrutiny, V (1936): 44-47, he emphasizes that we cannot 
treat a book as being impersonal as a breaking wave since we inevitably think of 
it as a human product, as implicitly sanctioning and developing interests and 
ideals and attitudes of our own. 
'' »The Bond with the Author.<< The Use of English, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer 
1971): 307-19, 325. 
82 

reader's part in reading and the author's control of his meaning. The questi­
ons concerning the meaning of literary works are thus in the focus of his 
attention, ranging from the possibility of the reader's entirely idiosyncratic 
meanings to the historical changes of meaning resulting in time-added 
meaning. 
Profesor Harding points out that there is nothing wrong with completely 
idiosyncratic interpretations of poems, art or anything. However, this is not 
all we want: if we only wanted this, there would be no need for authors and 
artists. We could simply take a benzedrine tablet and let our imagination 
loose. If we want to take literature seriously as literature, not just as an 
object stimulating idiosyncratic responses, we should make an attempt at 
understanding it in terms in which it has been offered. Though merely pri­
vate idiosyncratic interpretation of literary works is stimulated by much 
current criticism, he believes that such interpretation means the loss of the 
implicit social link between the reader and the author. In a way it affects 
the work for the reader: 
If what he enjoys in a work of art is unconnected with the artist's 
satisfaction, the work becomes an unintended feature of the world, 
non-social, like a sunset or a canyon, beautiful perhaps but not media­
ting contact with the human maker." 
Emphasis is laid especially on the social aspect of our enjoyment of lite­
rature or of any pleasing object and on the fact that we crave the sense of 
shared interest and sympathy. The background of a social culture »Which we 
feel to be supporting or challenging or failing to understand our enjoyment« 
continues to be in force also when we are by ourselves. In this, Professor 
Harding reminds us, »We are inescapably social.«
51 
In the presence of man-made objects we are not only related to our 
fellow-onlookers but we also enter in a social relationship with the maker, 
even if he is unknown or dead. Misunderstandings and mistakes are common 
in such a relationship, as in other relationships, so that the reader's miscon­
ceiving what the author has written cannot be regarded as peculiar at all, 
yet the reader is not satisfied with such misconceptions: 
We are not, however, content to misunderstand; it comes as a disap­
pointment to find that something we valued in an author is based on 
our misreading. The fact that someone chose to make the work of 
art in the form we find satisfying, chose at least to the extent of 
letting it go as finished or publishable, is a vital element of our pleas­
ure in it.
5
' 
Such considerations lead also to the problems of the author's control of the 
reader's response. The possibility of less defined and less controlled meanings 
and associations of words may result in greater uncertainty and idiosyncratic 
readings with every reader enjoying a different poem. And Professor Harding 
calls our attention to the difficulty arising from the fact that the author can 
only offer the verbal component of a pattern of inner experience, the totality 
of which includes much else besides words and articulate thought. 
6''' 
50 
Experience into Words, p. 164. 
SI Ibid., p. 164. 
" Ibid., p. 165. 
83 

Still he insists on the importance of the bond between the reader and 
the author, for >>a literature is not just a sequence of authors but a growing 
social structure of which readers form an integral part.« >>Understanding in 
the reader and intelligibility in the author are essential to a literature and 
involve obligations in both.«s3 
>>The Bond with the Author« explores further consequences of this >>bond<< 
for the reader's private commerce with literature, and its relevance for lite­
rature as a social institution. The fact that along with the action and ex­
perience of characters the author always presents also his own evaluation 
of what is done and felt (as heroic, pathetic, contemptible, charming, funny 
and so on) and implicitly invites the reader to share his attitude, makes it 
obligatory for the reader to perceive and evaluate these elements also, so 
the reader's task is not complete unless he tacitly evaluates the author's 
evaluations and takes his own attitude towards them. The readers may only 
seldom speak and think about such attitudes, yet their implicit decisions 
with respect to them form an integral part of their literary experience. 
The fact that we practically always experience a work not just as a 
happening but as >>Somebody's offering<<: 
Implicitly we think of a work as being offered to us by someone, as 
having had significance for another person and not being an imperso· 
nal accident like the flickering of flames. Part of our own satisfaction 
is the sense that some other human being found it satisfying to con­
template such and such possibilities of experience and evaluate them 
in such and such a way, that when we share his satisfaction some 
mutual sanctioning of values is occurring, and that we have this quasi­
social relation with him even if he is dead or totally inaccessible.<<" 
has several consequences for its reading. It explains why some readers feel 
disturbed when an author revises his work in a way they think spoils it, and 
why abridged books are unsatisfactory. The consequences of this fact are 
even more far-reaching for editors who, because of this very fact, must not 
give way to their own preferences. Also the question of the relevance of the 
biographical knowledge about the author for our reading of his work is 
related to the same fact: though in principle such knowledge is not necessary 
or relevant, the reader inevitably wants to fit his work or works and the 
biographical facts into some sort of a pattern. 
If literature is to create the necessary link between the reader and the 
author, Professor Harding maintains, the author's control of the reader's 
response must count for something: some degree of control and direction by 
the author is essential. Though objective demonstrations of misreadings arc 
very hard and sometimes impossible, and our readings are fragmentary and 
difficult to formulate, we still must attempt to formulate the sense of a work, 
otherwise we have no way of knowing whether we and other readers are 
sharing and valuing the same poem for anything like the same reasons. 
Regardless of its limitations such a formulation of sense is preliminary to 
53 
Ibid., p. 173. The problems of the author's intelligibility, or rather ability to 
control his readers, and the corollary question of the reader's capacity for response 
are never lost sight of in Professor Harding's criticism. See his discussion of the 
restricted capacity of Blake's reading public in Experience into Words, pp. 49 and 
52, of Coleridge's leaving his poem as it stands, ibid., p. 71, and of the problems 
and origins of obscurity in T. S. Eliot's poetry, ibid., pp. 104 and following. 
54 
>>The Bond with the Author«, p. 311. 
84 

any discussion of literature and thus necessary to maintain »a living lite­
rature« characterized by Professor Harding as »a social institution, with an 
active social or quasi-social process going on between readers and author 
and between one reader and another« .
55 
This very process contributes to the 
gradual extension in the relevance of individual works of literature. In this 
way, >>in a process of reinterpreting the literature of the past, of rediscover­
ing some and neglecting very much, of sometimes finding new insights or 
just establishing a new fashion<<, lasting works can be given current relevance 
by their later readers and kept alive for them. 
PRACTICE IN ENJOYMENT OF ARTS 
Along with his endeavour to penetrate into the psychological processes 
involved in entertainment and reading, to procure a more tenable explanation 
of what actually happens in them and, on this basis, to provide a more ade­
quate terminology for their description and discussion, Professor Harding 
has always been interested also in the possibilities of improving these activi­
ties. This interest can be traced back to his first study of entertainment in 
which he writes: »If its finer possibilities are to be realized, entertainment 
must be developed for its own sake, with an understanding of its own special 
function ... <<
56 
His first attempt to answer the question of how to reach a more quali­
fied enjoyment of arts was given for the field of music in >>The Social Back­
ground of Taste in Music<<
57 
already in 1938, and conceived in terms of 
acquiring a genuine taste in music. The first, preliminary answer of psycho­
logy seems to be the notion of practice: the enjoyment of a piece of music, 
in anything like its full complexity, has to be regarded as a skill which the 
listener must practice to acquire. The amount of practice needed depends on 
the quality of music and >>the degree of skill and the range of skills in listen­
ing which the listener possesses<<. Above all, practice cannot and should not 
be replaced by any other thing: 
Practice must not be confused with the intellectual dissection of mu­
sic, or anything that can be achieved by merely acquiring knowledge 
about it. It is a matter rather of entering into the music in all its 
aspects as fully and honestly as one can at each hearing - a matter 
essentially of attentive enjoyment, attentive dislike, or even attentive 
bafflement. It means trying to miss as little as possible to pass by 
without affecting one's total state of mind. Practice of this kind may 
be of every degree of intensiveness, from merely hearing the same 
thing over and over again, to the highest degree of concentrated 
listening." 
Irrespective of its great importance, mere practice is not sufficient for 
the development of good taste, because it tends to remain in one path of 
55 
Ibid., p. 317. 
56 
>>Adult Education and Adult Entertainment«, 19. Cf. note 1 for bibliographic 
details. 
57 
»The Social Background of Taste in Music.<< The Musical Times, Vol. 79, No. 
1143 (May 1938): 333-35 and >>The Social Background of Taste in Music II - Indi­
vidual Growth in Taste.<< The Musical Times, Vol. 79, No. 1144 (June 1938): 417-19. 
" Ibid., p. 417. 
85 

listening only and does not equip the listener for the skilled experience of 
other kinds of music. The widening of this sphere of skilled enjoyment of 
music can be aided by criticism and education which have >>the equally neces­
sary task of stimulating the listener to further exploration. They have to 
promote range and variety in his skills of appreciation, to ask constantly 
whether an increasingly sensitive response in one particular direction is 
worth achieving or whether exploration along other lines might not be more 
rewarding.«s9 
The psychological processes involved in the development of the capacity 
to enjoy arts in general, that is, the processes of practice, exploration and 
integration, are the main concern of »Skills of Enjoyment« (1948).
60 
In de­
scribing the psychological processes which may increase individual respon­
siveness to works of art Professor Harding uses concrete examples from 
music, representational arts such as novel and play, visual arts, yet his study 
as a whole implies that the processes discussed apply to the improvement 
of appreciation of all the arts. 
Practice is the first and most important of these processes. The term is 
used in a wide sense »to refer to the fact that in certain kinds of activity 
repeated attentive performance leads to a demand for a more complex form 
of the same kind of activity.«
61 
Especially some intrinsically satisfying lines 
of human activity seem to invite endless extension and development in which 
we want not a mere repetition of the last experience but something more 
complex or extensive or refined, in short, the same kind of activity in a form 
which we would have found a little too difficult on the first occasion. Skilled 
enjoyment cannot be mastered without such a repetition resulting in exten­
sion and development of taste. Skills of enjoyment are thus always acquired 
gradually and by practice. It is only because we may acquire them by imper­
ceptible stages that we are not aware of this process. This fact, however, 
does not diminish the high importance of practice: 
The idea of practice in enjoyment is simply that repeated response 
to the same work of art, if it really is attentive response, creates in­
creasing ability to respond. If the work of art gives no scope for this 
increased ability we experience some kind and degree of boredom -
not apathy, but the satiety which can become a desire for further 
development. 
62 
Like many kinds of human activity which are characterized by their capacity 
for indefinite extension, the idea of practice in gaining skilled response must 
be freed from any implication of approach to some definite goal. Though it 
cannot be judged by an objective criterion, practiced response to the arts 
simply tends to increase the skills of appreciation. The notion of practice also 
implies specificity: practice in a particular skill of appreciation does not 
lead directly to the appreciation of other arts; therefore Professor Harding 
warns us that »there is no unitary ability to enjoy 'the arts' in general but 
only skills of enjoyment in particular arts or subdivision of them«.
63 
" Ibid., p. 418. 
60 
»Skills of Enjoyment.« The Changing World, No. 4 (May, June, July 1948): 
16-29. Based on a paper read before the Cambridge New Contemporary Society 
in February 1947. 
86 
61 
Ibid., p. 16. 
62 
Ibid., p. 19. 
" Ibid., p. 20. 

He again calls attention to the fact that information about arts must 
not be mistaken for practice in appreciation: 
The attentive practice in the arts which brings an increased ability to 
respond must not, of course, be confused with accepting instruction or 
acquiring information or intellectually dissecting what one enjoys. It 
consists in repeatedly exposing oneself to the work of art as fully as 
possible, in the hope that on successive occasions less and less of the 
work will fail to have an effect, and successively fewer features or 
aspects will escape integration within what we experience as the total 
effect." 
Though practice along a particular line of interest will not lead directly 
to a different line of interest, long-continued and oft-repeated practice may 
produce some degree of boredom and induce the person to the exploration 
of different possibilities, leading him to new and unknown areas of art, to 
the exercise of new abilities, and to the development of responsiveness to 
new features or aspects of our surroundings and experience. Offering new 
insights into the already familiar and making them more vivid, such new 
possibilities of experience and appreciation may also change the structure 
of our sentiments and values. In this way the process of exploration of new 
possibilities comes to invite also the third process of trying to achieve 
integration and coherence of multiple interests, beliefs, sentiments and atti­
tudes making up our personality. This last process is seen as an effort 
towards consistency and coherence in evaluations. 
It is in the sphere of the last two processes - exploration of new 
possibilities and their integration - that criticism can be of use, since 
»it stimulates exploration, and it draws attention to the implications of 
particular value judgements and points of relevance and relationships that 
might be overlooked.«
65 
In accordance with this concept of criticism, Pro­
fessor Harding feels that criticism should not try to do more than offer 
opportunities for revising value judgements, even though as social beings we 
all desire the satisfaction of having the sympathy and sanction of other people 
for our interests and appraisals, and may also resort to different means of 
persuasion to obtain such a sanction. 
The concept of criticism as anticipated in »The Social Background of 
Taste in Music« and »Skills of Enjoyment<< is strictly adhered to and deve­
loped for literary criticism in >>The Literary Critic<< (1953).
66 
Professor Har­
ding emphasizes that criticism ought not to spare the people the trouble 
of reading books worth reading, but should rather stimulate fully personal 
response to them and encourage the reader to return to them with an 
unsettled mind and new questions. The first test of the critic's usefulness 
to the reader is whether the critic gives the reader the opportunity and 
incentive to read more effectively for himself. With modern and unfamiliar 
literature, the critic need not make our reading easy; he should rather help 
us surpass the simple hostility and derision that spring from having our 
preconceptions and expectations disappointed. In such conditions the critic's 
job is »to prepare us for the unexpected features of a new work. He may 
he should - go on to question whether they justify themselves, but he 
" Ibid., pp. 20-21. 
65 
Ibid., p. 28. 
66 
»The Literary Critic.« The Listener, October 15, 1953, pp. 637-38. 
87 

must first make the effort of grasping, and helping us to grasp, what it is 
that the author has really aimed at.«
67 
Also in the sphere of evaluation the critic should not spare his readers 
the responsibility of making their own appraisal: 
He will not, if he is wise, pretend to be the mouthpiece of fixed 
and unquestionable critical canons. What he has to report are his 
personal experiences in the presence of the work of art and the 
judgement he suggests must remain simply a suggestion, to be 
confirmed or modified by other readers on their own responsibility.<<" 
The readers should exercise their own capacity to respond and take their 
own responsibility in value judgements; they should agree intelligently or 
disagree precisely and profitably on the basis of the critic's description of 
the features and aspects of the work leading him to his evaluation. 
»Practice at Liking: A Study in Experimental Aesthetics«
69 
describes 
and presents the results of an experimental investigation of the changes in 
the reader's likes and dislikes for poetry. It proceeds from the assumption 
that the effect of social pressure - persuasion, suggestion and received 
opinion - on the reader's assessment of a work of literature is so striking 
that other processes affecting liking and preference for poetry receive less 
attention and are accordingly less known. That is why Professor Harding 
has decided to study the process of familiarization of a poem as a relatively 
non-social factor in the reader response. The aim of his study was >>to 
examine the possibility that increasing familiarity with poems, in the 
absence of social influences such as instruction, persuasion or discussion, 
would produce systematic changes of evaluation; and, further, that the 
nature of the changes would be in part predictable on the assumption that 
repeated readings of a poem can be viewed as practice at a task.<<
70 
Thirty poems or self-contained passages from longer poems were given, 
without the author's name, to 139 readers. The subjects attended the labo­
ratory twice, at an interval of a week, and read and assessed the 26 poems 
twice on each occasion. The subjects were first- or second-year female 
undergraduates studying science and arts. They volunteered for experimental 
work »On a psychological problem connected with reading<<. The poems 
were of varied style and difficulty. The subjects were requested to express 
their appraisal solely in terms of their present liking and their expectation 
of what satisfaction further reading might yield. On each of the four trials 
they were requested to put the poems in one of the following categories: 
A: too difficult but perhaps promising; 
B: attractive and understood, and perhaps capable of yielding more; 
C: attractive but easy, and not likely to yield more; 
D: unappealing and unlikely to increase in appeal." 
The results were calculated on 26 poems and represented statistically. They 
show that the changes in assessment take a consistent trend attributable 
" Ibid., p. 637. 
" Ibid., p. 638. 
69 
»Practice at Liking: A Study in Experimental AestheticS.<< (Fourth C. S. 
Meyers Lecture delivered on 15'h November 1967.) Bulletin of the British Psycho· 
logical Society, Vol. 21, No. 70 (January 1968): 3-10. 
" Ibid., p. 3. 
" Ibid., p. 4. 
88 

to the cumulative effect of practice, rather than the form of oscillations 
which would occur in the absence of systematic effects. The results thus 
confirmed the broad expectations in most respects. The process of familia­
rization first increases the subject's command of the complex skills of under­
standing and evaluating the poems. Between the last two trials, however, 
as their skill has increased, the subjects settle down to a less changeable 
way of responding, though their responses do not coincide with the respon­
ses of other subjects. Thus the results of this study seem to lead to the 
conclusion that the element of practice is brought to the fore when the 
reader is left on his own with the task of reading poems, without persuasion, 
simply given the chance to acquire what skill he can in his own way. The 
successive classifications of individual readers can be seen as stages in the 
acquisition of some degree of skill. 
* * * 
The foregoing presentation of Professor Harding's work shows that 
his investigations of man-related problems of entertainment, art, the reading 
process and of their impact upon man and society proceed from his broad 
cultural interest which enables him to see these activities in their wider 
social context. Even though his fastidious choice of language and his argu­
ment reveal the sensibility of the finest literary critic and his English 
scholarship transpires through the wealth of well-chosen literary examples, 
the point of departure of his studies must be regarded as primarily psycho­
logical. This approach seems to carry into practice his belief »that psycho­
logy ought to be of importance to things outside itself«
72 
and his hope »that 
a scientific discipline could clear the ground in such a case and make 
some small advances toward greater probability in judging the validity of 
seemingly subtle or profound insights into complex topics<< which, as he 
says, brought him to psychology.7
3 
His twofold speCialization in Engli~h 
studies and in psychology has thus resulted in an interdisciplinary approach 
which seems to be particularly appropriate for his studies. 
The psychological point of departure determines his concept of enter­
tainment and the reading process, his manner of examining and describing 
these two activities, and also his evaluation of their significance for indivi­
duals and for society as a whole. Entertainment and the reading process 
are thus conceived as normal human activities which do not constitute a 
separate category, but are rather continuous with and significantly similar 
to other human activities, and are accordingly to be examined as such in 
their basic relatedness to other pursuits. Consequently, Professor Harding 
embarks on the examination of the psychological processes that can be 
distinguished in reading and never conceives of it in such metaphorical 
terms as some of contemporary critics, as for instance the transplantation 
of experience from one mind to another,7
4 
or in terms of some more mo­
dern trends such as the process of assembling the text's meaning, or as 
72 
Ibid., p. 3. 
" »Psycholo,o-ical Problems in the Recognition of Excellence.« (Address) The 
Advancement o Science, Vol. 10, No. 38 (September 1953), p. 22. 
" Lascelles Abercrombie, Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Victor 
Gollancz, 1932, p. 24. 
89 

»an activity guided by the text; this must be processed by the reader, 
who is then, in turn, affected by what he has processed« .
75 
His analysis. of entertainment and the reading process proceeds from 
the description of the social situation set up by these two activities in 
which the entertainer or the speaker >>presents what he takes to be an 
interesting situation - actual or possible - in what he regards as an 
appropriate light<<. His act of choosing the situation and of representing 
it in such a way makes it clear that »he expects audience to agree that the 
situation is interesting and the attitude taken up towards it appropriate; 
implicitly he is asking for their sanction for his interests and evaluations<<J6 
The perception of this situation in its wider social context makes it possible 
for Professor Harding to explain what occurs in it: a reciprocal sanctioning 
of the interests, ideals, and attitudes between the public and the speaker 
resulting in an influence upon the emotional life and values of people. 
The differentiation of the various attitudes on the part of the speaker 
or writer: his selection of an interesting experience to portray, his taking 
a supposedly fitting attitude to it and suggesting or expecting that the 
reader take the same attitude or approve of the attitude taken, calls to 
mind I. A. Richards' famous presentation of the four different functions of 
language. The four different kinds of meaning related to the several tasks 
which language has to perform simultaneously are listed in Practical Cri­
ticism (1929) as: 1. sense, directing the hearer's attention upon some state 
of affairs, 2. the simultaneous expression of the speaker's feeling about such 
items, 3. the tone expressing the speaker's attitude to his listener, and 4. the 
intention conveying his purpose.7
7 
The similarity between the two differen­
tiations of the speaker's attitude, however, leads to no similar conclusion: 
whereas I. A. Richards sees an additional source of misunderstanding in 
the possibility of the reader's garbling the sense, mistaking the tone and 
disregarding the intention, Harding sticks to the social nature of the situa­
tion. The writer and the reader take part in it as social beings interested 
in the experience of fellow human beings and desirous of their social 
sanction of their own interests, attitudes and values, the writer offering 
what he has to say and the reader approving or disapproving of what is said 
and the manner in which it is offered in accordance with his own views 
and values. This situation is thus seen as placing the reader and the author 
in a special social relationship, and on this basis Professor Harding construes 
his concept of the reader's bond with the author, which obliges the reader 
to try to understand the meaning of a literary work as an offering by the 
author and not to let his imagination loose to produce idiosyncratic mean­
ings. The range of acceptable meanings is for Harding defined by this essen­
tial bond, the social relationship to be established between the reader and 
the author, and determined by the latter's satisfaction in his work regardless 
of his original intention.7
8 
;s Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 
1978, p. 163. 
;, See notes 24 and 2. 
77 
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929, 
pp. 174--6. 
78 
Experience into Words, p. 166: »What he (the author) intended to write 
at any moment prior to the arrival of words is not of crucial importance; the 
question is what he accepted as part of his poem.<< 
90 

Professor Harding's concept of the basic situation of entertainment and 
reading, its similarity to gossip, and of the social bond between the reader 
and the author, seems to come closer to the later speech-act theories of 
literature which it anticipates. If we take as an example Mary Louise Pratt's 
work Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977)7
9 
some simi­
larities are easily visible - despite her use of different linguistic termino­
logy - in the heavy emphasis she lays on formal and functional re­
semblance between the literary and natural narratives. She also points out 
that oral narrative of personal experience is a speech act exceedingly fami­
liar to everybody, because verbal rendering and display of experience con­
stitute a fundamentally human activity. Though her work shows no evidence 
of her knowledge of Harding's writings, her descriptions of the basic narra­
tive situation inevitably remind us of his analyses: 
In making an assertion whose relevance is tellability, a speaker is 
not only reporting but also verbally displaying a state of affairs, 
inviting his addressee(s) to join him in contemplating it, evaluating 
it, and responding to it. His point is to produce in his hearers not 
only belief but also an imaginative and affective involvement in 
the state of affairs he is representing and an evaluative stance toward 
it. He intends them to share his wonder, amusement, terror, or 
admiration of the event." -
And like Professor Harding she directly proceeds to indicate that literary 
works share this narrative situation with the natural narrative: 
However, we ultimately wish to characterize this verbal experience­
displaying, experience-sharing .activity (I have not begun to do so 
adequately), it is clear that literary works, or at least a great many 
of them, are also examples of it. Like the natural narrator, the 
speaker of a literary work is understood to be displaying an expe­
rience or a state of affairs, creating a verbal version in which he, 
and we along with him, contemplate, explore, interpret, and evaluate, 
seeking pleasure and interpretive consensus." 
Along with the obvious similarities between both descriptions of the narra­
tive situation, even a provisional comparison of both concepts reveals also 
important differences. Pratt proceeds primarily from a linguistic point of 
view, so her interest is centred on the questions of meaning, especially the 
limitations imposed by the speech act concept of literature on various 
textual and structuralist »free« interpretations, whereas Professor Harding 
undertakes, as we have seen, the task of analyzing also the wider social 
consequences of this situation. 
The attempt to offer a profounder examination and a more accurate 
description of entertainment and of the reading process by the use of psy­
chology accounts for Professor Harding's primary concern with identifying 
what actually happens in these two activities in different concrete situations 
and under various circumstances. Following his own recommendation of 
what is necessary to understand an activity,
82 
his painstaking, minute 
79 
Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. 
"' Ibid., p. 136. 
" Ibid., p. 140. 
" Cf. note 20. 
91 

description of every element and detail of entertainment and reading avoids 
a priori assumptions and generalizations devoid of understandable meaning. 
It moves from one element to another and sometimes takes up for further 
examination a single concept or previously neglected aspect years after he 
first scrutinized it. His analyses naturally proceed from the examination 
of the contemporaneous state of knowledge about the problem discussed 
and are often motivated also by his critical dissatisfaction with this state. 
Thus he is concerned with the fact that entertainment never receives the 
sort of serious consideration that is given to other human activities and 
is not discussed in relation to the rest of human lives, in terms of its 
purpose and function. He is critical of the manner and vague terminology 
whereby the reading process is spoken about in terms of »some rather vague 
waffle compounded of psychoanalysis, sociology and literary criticism«,
83 
which would be unacceptable in the description of how a rat learns a maze. 
Professor Harding's criticism is thus directed against much contempora­
neous discussion of the reading and some concepts used in it: »a good deal 
of pseudo-psychologizing that sees the process of novel-reading as one of 
identification and vicarious satisfaction<<.
84 
It sets out to refute Jung's 
prevailing view that »The cinema ... like the detective story, makes it 
possible to ex per i en c e without danger all the excitement, passion 
and desirousness which must be repressed in the humanitarian ordering of 
life<<,
85 
and to criticize Q. D. Leavis's notion that much novel-reading is the 
indulgence in wish-fulfilment fantasies, as expressed in her Fiction and the 
Reading Public (1932).
86 
The need and the importance of Harding's pole­
mic against such theories and concepts - in particular of his insistence on 
the unreality of any such psychological processes as vicarious satisfaction 
or an undefined identification of the reader in the process of reading -
become evident only in the light of the fact that such concepts continue 
to be used by prominent scholars in spite of his illuminating analysis of 
their inadequacy and possible pathological suggestionsP 
His critical analysis of the reading process reveals the need for the 
recognition and examination of some other activities which constitute an 
integral part of it. Besides perception and comprehension which are preli­
minary, he underlines the importance of the reader's imaginative or empha­
tic insight into other living things and of his evaluation of the characters 
and what they undergo in the relation to his own value scheme, along with 
the evaluation of the fittingness of the author's attitude to what is presented. 
83 
»Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction<<, p. 133. Cf. note 26 
for bibliographic details. 
" Ibid., p. 140. 
85 
Ibid., p. 142. See also Harding's review C. G. Jung's Modern Man in Search 
of a Soul in Scrutiny, Ill (1934), p. 110 saying »But he (Jung) is so vague and 
unscientific - his tone is something between the conversational and oracular 
- that he adds little to what we have probably felt for ourselveS.<< 
'" Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus, 
1932. Harding refers in particular to the chapter »Living at the Novelist's 
Expense«. 
" Suffice it to list only two outstandincr studies: 
Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1968. Chapter 10, »Character and Identification«, pp. 262-280. 
Hans Robert Jauss, Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. 
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. 
92 

Both these activities claim reader's active participation and support Hard­
ing's view that the concept of reader's passivity is out of keeping with what 
actually happens in reading. His emphasis on the imaginative elements in 
the reading process is based on a meticulous examination of human capa­
city to imagine possible human experience in various circumstances, and 
on the scrutiny of the multiple reasons for such imaginative activity. Draw­ ing on every possible examination of such activities reaching b ack to the 
earliest childhood, the most recent trends in the study of the role of fictions 
in human lives seem, decades later, to prove Professor Harding's emphasis 
on imaginative activities to be well-founded. Richard Kuhns, one of the 
several authors who convened to discuss the integrative function of fictional 
objects, notably art, writes: 
The inherited creations, the »made<< events, are probably raore im­
portant in the process of giving a structure to consciousness than 
any other kind of event, including natural events." 
In this description he comes close to Harding's concept of the effects of 
reading and entertainment. 
It must be pointed out that Harding's original approach to and insights 
into the reading do not result only from his painstaking and conscientious 
examination of the reading process and its elements which avoids any 
entanglement with evaluations and shows his everpresent awareness that 
much is still unknown in this complex area of human activities. They can 
be understood only against the background of his wide psychological know­
ledge, above all in his special field of social psychology, which is not limited 
to western cultures only but can use a variety of other cultures for com­
parison. 
When Professor Harding turned to examine entertainment and the 
reading process he was obviously confronted with the same situation, or 
rather state of affairs, as many other British authors concerned with the 
effects of the so-called mass culture of the 20s and 30s in England, like 
F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, the Lynds and many others.
89 
With all of them 
he shared a common concern with the then undesirable »debased« state 
of (mass) culture. Out of this common concern there grew various expla­ nations and different recommendations for solutions. As we have seen, 
Professor Harding clearly voiced his dissatisfaction with the contempora­
neous treatments of entertainment and the persisting descriptions of 
reading. Thus he explicitly rejected the opinion that entertainment should 
" Richard Kuhns, »The Cultural Function of Fiction« in Funk tionen des 
Fiktiven, ed. by Dietrich Heinrich and Wolfgang Iser. Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink, 
1983, p. 62. 
" Cf. F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Mi­
nority Press, 1930. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment. 
London: Chatto & Windus, 1933. See also Professor Harding's reviews: »The 
Conception of Leisure.« Review of Leisure: A Suburban Study, by George 
A. Lundberg; of The Bleak Age, by J. L. Hammond and Barbara. Han_1mond; ~nd 
of The Machine and the Worker, by A. Barratt Brown. The Soczologtcal Revtew, 
Vol. 27, No. 3 (July 1935): 359-62. »Vitality in Social Surveys.« Review of 
Middletown in Transition, by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Herrell Lynd, and of 
May the Twelfth, Mass-Observation Day-Survey, ed. by Humphrey Jennings et 
al. Scrutiny, VI (1937) : 313-15. 
93 

be replaced by something less objectionable and set out to examine severaiJ. 
misconceived notions of the spectator's and reader's passivity, escapist 
attitudes, naive identification and vicarious experience. His explicit reason 
for the rejection of such views is that they offer no basis for further 
examination of these activities which would make possible their improve­
ment. 
Professor Harding's alternative seems quite clear: since it is quite 
obvious that entertainment, notwithstanding all of its argued qualities, must 
have appeared to satisfy some existent needs it should be studied and then 
improved to be »as good as it might be<<. In this his attitude to entertain­
ment differs from the attitude of other critics. He never merely criticizes 
the existent conditions like some other critics of the time, but rather 
insists on the necessity to t:xamine them and even sets out to determine 
them by means of a questionnaire addressed to the readers of The Highway. 
So for instance he does not deplore the low taste in music but rather 
considers it »a failure to educate an unprecedented mass of listeners«.90 
Similarly he never criticizes or even reproaches less practiced readers for 
their inability to derive satisfaction from more serious literature. On the 
contrary, he claims that trashy literature may have high intrinsic appeal 
for people of less practiced taste, and for them may not be escapist at all.
91 
Every human being - in his opinion - has the right to satisfy his needs 
in accordance with his capacities. 
And yet each of us is the equal of all others in this sense: that he 
has an equal right to live his own life, and that everyone's supreme 
satisfaction lies in fulfilling himself and developing whatever capa­
cities he may have. I have no right to say even to a mental defective 
»Your life counts for less than mine«." 
In accordance with this he never accepts or uses Q. D. Leavis's division of 
the readers into high-, middle-, and low-brow readers, or any other dero­
gatory description of readers or consumers of popular entertainment, but 
rather strictly speaks of less practiced and more practiced readers and 
tastes. 
This need for tolerance is strictly observed in his concept of the 
function of literary criticism, which can be said to go a step beyond 
T. S. Eliot's famous statement: >>The critic must not coerce, and he must 
not make judgments of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the 
reader will form the correct judgment for himself.<<
93 
in explaining why the 
reader must be induced to take his own value decisions in accordance with 
his own value system and accept responsibility for such decisions. He not 
only sees nothing disturbing if - in the absence of any cogent external 
authority to appeal to - people differ in their critical opinions,
94 
but believes 
"' »The Social Background of Taste in Music«, p. 333. For bibliographic 
details see note 68. 
'' »The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment«, p. 23. Cf. note 45 
for bibliographic details. 
92 
»Social Background of Nursing - Part 1.« Nursing Mirror, October 30, 
1948, p. 70. 
" T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. London: University Paperbacks, 1960, p. 11. 
The essay >>The Perfect Critic<< was originally published in 1928. 
94 
»Skills of Enjoyment<<, p. 29. Cf. note 71 for bibliographic details. 
94 

any effort at standardization unnecessary and undesirable: >>We should still 
be unwise to impose it by means of psychological and administrative machi­
nery on people who judged differently.<<
95 
He disbelieves in the possibility 
of any >>purely individual judgment« without social influences% and clearly 
asserts: >>All our judgements are made in social context and this affects them 
as inevitably as our perception of an object is affected by its physical back­
ground.«97 Such views, however, do not lead him to neglect the possibility 
of higher standards of the arts; on the contrary, he is constantly interested in 
the possibilities of improvement on the basis of profounder studies, and 
especially by means of practice as a possibility of acquiring a more skilled 
response to the arts. 
His notion of practice by means of which greater skill in the enjoyment 
of the arts can be acquired proceeds from his basic assumption that an 
adequate experience of art, especially largely unknown modern art, is a comp­
lex activity demanding previous practice. This view also makes it necessary 
for him to conceive the individual's present skill as changeable: determinable 
for a given person at a given time, but subject to change, notably to 
improvement by practice. Such a concept seems to imply also a con­
cept of an integrated personality capable of developing his multiple 
possibilities and accordingly also of improving his capacity to experience 
art at a more skilled level. Harding's studies are too down-to-earth to ever 
attempt even a preliminary outline of any such ideal. Regardless of harsh 
realities such a concept seems necessary at least as an ideal to sustain the 
belief in the possibility of improvement. Close scrutiny of his writings perhaps 
permits detection of some elements of such a concept. Trying to outline the 
new role of industrial psychology in 1933, he writes that the worker should 
not be regarded as a working mechanism but primarily as a living being 
whose work can only be understood as an integral part of his life.9s Only a 
year later, speaking about how adult education neglects the capacity for 
feeling and evaluating, he asks provocatively: >>Of what use are information 
and the ability to think clearly in certain directions if they leave their posses­
sor at the mercy of every charlatan of feeling who produces a film or writes 
a popular song?« and adds that a person educated in this limited way is 
surely pathetic.
99 
In his comment concerning the values of an industrial 
society in 1956, he again calls attention to the limitations of such a scale 
of values and any education preparing people for service to industry: »Educa­
tion in a proper sense would be at least as much concerned with the quality 
of living in the rest of our lives.«
100 
" >>English and Intelligence.« The Use of English, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring 1951), 
p. 123. 
96 
>>Skills of Enjoyment«, p. 29. See note 73. 
" >>The Social Background of Taste in Music<<, p. 333. See note 68. 
98 
»Some Social Implications of Industrial Psychology.« The Highway, Vol. 25 
(March 1933), p. 22. 
" »Adult Education and Adult Entertainment«, pp. 22-3. Cf. note 1 for biblio­
graphic details. 
100 
»Values in an Industrial Society: A Comment.« In His Royal Highness 
the Duke of Edinbw·gh's Study Conference on the Human Problems of Industrial 
Communities within the Commonwealth and Empire, 9-27 July 1956. Volume II: 
Background Papers, Appendices and Index (1957). London: Oxford University 
Press, p. 6. 
95 

Professor Harding's examination of the psychological processes traceable 
in entertainment and in reading at the present state of the development of 
psychology first reveals new insights into these two activities; these insights 
are of great interest to everybody concerned with literature and entertain­
ment, especially to teachers, critics and those readers who have come to 
wonder what exactly they are doing when they read. His analyses of what 
happens to people engaging in entertainment and reading also offer new 
insights into the impact of these activities upon individuals, and thereby 
into their wider cultural function. They make it quite clear that entertain­
ment and reading are not only temporary distractions offering an escape 
from whatever part or aspect of reality the person wants to run away and 
leaving whoever indulges in them in a state of complete passivity. They are 
first and foremost the activities which, in offering various possibilities 
of human experience for consideration in a special social communication and 
for a complex evaluation, may come to have a deeper effect leading to a 
permanent formative impact upon their consumer's outlook, expectations of 
what is likely to happen, emotional attitudes and value system. In this way 
they may come to exercise a profound influence upon whole communities 
by sanctioning social values and emotional life. Professor Harding's studies 
thus furnish a detailed psychological description of the ways in which the 
process of the social construction of reality takes place, in particular of the 
role of entertainment and reading in this process.
10
i Besides this, his various 
analyses offer also a sounder basis for a more persuasive argument about 
the importance of literature and the arts and whatever may be classified as 
entertainment than any offered by the critics professing the importance of 
elite or by other apologists for literature. We can see in them also a warn­
ing about the possible influence of mass media unthinkable in the time when 
Professor Harding started to examine the reading process and entertainment 
» ... very many years ago, in the 1930s, when the cinema still flourished and 
television was unknown.«
102 
It is hoped that our presentation has revealed at least some features 
of the striking originality of Professor Harding's work: his choice of the 
problems to be treated as a whole and in terms of details and aspects, his 
approach and treatment of them, his independent-minded opinion and chal­
lenging argumentation, and his suggestions of possible solutions of improve­
ment and resulting analyses. It is hard or even impossible to speculate 
whether such originality of his work is to be related primarily to his twofold 
specialization in psychology and in English studies, which has made available 
to him profound knowledge of two different spheres that is most profitably 
combined in his studies of entertainment and the process of reading, or to 
any other particularity of his interest, accident of his life or feature of his 
personality. However, it seems quite certain that without such a combination 
and breadth. of knowledge his studies could not have taken the same original 
development and yielded the same results. Along with his interest in the 
101 
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of 
Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday & Com­
pany, 1967, p. 68. See also the discussion of the importance of conversation, 
p. 152, for a comparison with Harding's notion of the role of gossip. 
102 
»The Notion of 'Escape' in Fiction and Entertainment«, p. 24. See note 45 
for bibliographic details. 
96 

unknown and previously undiscussed aspects of entertainment and the read­
ing process, this twofold specialization contributes to make his work different 
from both purely literary and solely psychological discussion of the same 
subjects. Perhaps it is the newness of his interdisciplinary approach that 
must be held responsible for the fact that some of his original results have 
been slower to assimilate than some other authors' more conventional and 
less complex opinions. 
7 Acta 
97