Reading with Large Language Models

This essay is part of a proposed collection of essays for MFS Modern Fiction Studies about “Cultural AI” edited by Richard Jean So and Aarthi Vadde.

Literary scholars’ justified opposition to their students’ use of large language models (LLMs) to avoid the reading, writing, and thinking that constitute literary studies obscures how LLMs can advance literary scholarship. Broadly, I argue that literary scholars can read with LLMs when they adopt what Louise Rosenblatt terms the efferent stance toward texts, but not when they adopt what she terms the aesthetic stance.¹ I show how LLMs have already been used for literary scholarship in accordance with this implicit norm, including but not limited to uses in the digital humanities.