As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a book about the social and cultural implications of AI, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I’m planning it to have eight chapters, with the sixth and seventh being in science fiction mode, rather than the non-fiction mode I use in the other chapters and that is standard for such books. In discussing this with ChatGPT 5.2, it (he, she, they – I’ve never asked it what pronouns it prefers) remarked:
When prediction fails, fiction becomes a legitimate cognitive instrument. That is why Chapters 6 and 7 are not “illustrations.” They are epistemological machinery.
That struck me, hard. I decided to follow up on that and entered into a brief discussion about academic literary criticism after World War II and its avenging nemesis, Harold Bloom. The rest of this post consists of excerpts from that conversation along into which I have inserted a bit from Tyler Cowen’s essay on novels as models.
The academic discipline of literary criticism
Here’s the prompt I gave to ChatGPT:
Now I understand what academic literary criticism (in America) has been about since WWII. It’s obvious that literature is about pleasure and beauty, but also escape. That yields a certain critical practice. And there’s critical practice around the notion of literature as moral instruction. But literary texts as cognitive tools, as epistemic instruments? That didn’t get institutionalized until after WWII with the rise of interpretive criticism. And THAT’s why there was all that controversy in the 1960s and 1970s about validity in criticism. Critics were now treating texts as authoritative instruments of cultural cognition. So it became imperative to determine just how the critic could know what the texts were saying. Otherwise it collapses down on the critic as mere opinion.
ChatGPT’s response:
You’re right: American literary criticism after WWII did quietly institutionalize the idea that literary texts function as epistemic instruments, even if it never quite said so in those terms.
Once critics moved beyond:
- pleasure,
- beauty,
- moral uplift,
and began treating texts as:
- sites of cultural knowledge,
- vehicles of historical consciousness,
- instruments for thinking about identity, power, subjectivity,
then validity became unavoidable.
That’s exactly why the 1960s–70s debates mattered so much:
- If texts are just aesthetic objects, disagreement is taste.
- If texts are moral instruction, disagreement is ethics.
- But if texts are tools for knowing, then disagreement becomes epistemological.
And epistemology demands standards.
The famous anxiety about “valid interpretations” was not pedantry; it was the growing pain of a discipline that had, without quite realizing it, claimed cognitive authority.
Cowen: Novels as Models
Just what does it mean to think of a literary text as a cognitive model? Consider an unpublished essay by an economist, Tyler Cowen, “Is a Novel a Model?” Here’s the abstract:
I defend the relevance of fiction for social science investigation. Novels can be useful for making some economic approaches – such as behavioral economics or signaling theory – more plausible. Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics. Economics can, and has, profited from the insights contained in novels. Nonetheless, while novels and models lie along a common spectrum, they differ in many particulars. I attempt a partial account of why we sometimes look to models for understanding, and other times look to novels.
I can’t imagine a more direct way of asserting that literary texts are cognitive instruments.
To be sure that is not the way literary critics talk and Cowen knows this. He notes that “there is a massive literature on what novels are all about, there is virtually nothing comparing novels to models,” which is linked to a long footnote referencing discussions of what novels are about from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, including literary critics. Literary critics will have been trained in Continental modes of thinking – with its philosophical, psychoanalytic, and Marxist strains – which are quite different from the empirical and mathematical economics Cowen learned at Harvard. Thus the cognitive style of literary criticism is different, perhaps even unrecognizably so, but it IS cognitive. Cowen is aware of this difference, which he acknowledges early in his article:
But in the larger picture social scientists should consider, for research reasons, spending time reading novels, and humanities professors should consider spending time with formal models. The two methods of investigation, despite notable and persisting differences, have more in common than is commonly supposed. Since this article is directed at social scientists, it should be thought of as pro-novel, relative to economic science as a whole, although individuals from the humanities may experience discomfort at seeing novels compared to models at all.
With that behind us, let’s turn to a literary critic, Harold Bloom, whom Cowen admires a great deal.
Harold Bloom
Bloom interests me because he has rejected post war literary criticism and thus has, implicitly, rejected the idea that literature can serve epistemic ends – though I suspect, if the issue were put to him in those terms, that he would claim, quite the contrary, that literature speeks to out deepest possible cognitive aspirations.
Here is the prompt I put to ChatGPT:
This also explains why I find Harold Bloom so puzzling and uninteresting as a critic. Brilliant he was, but he rejected the idea of literary texts as cognitive instruments. That’s what’s behind his rejection of those “critics of resentment.” Did they sometimes/often go overboard into polemic, sure. But they were treating texts as cognitive instruments. And thus they were not being reductive as Bloom claimed. I find it telling that when he rejected those critics (e.g. in his book on the canon) in favor of an aesthetic reading, he never developed an explicit account of just what an aesthetic reading was. He just asked the reader to accept of faith that’s that what Bloom was up to and that it was good. He was so brilliant in his range of reference and discourse that many were happy to accept him on face value.
ChatGPT’s response:
Yes—this puts your finger on the structural reason Bloom never quite mattered to you, despite his brilliance.
What puzzled you wasn’t his erudition or even his contrarianism; it was the epistemic vacuum at the center of his position.
Bloom’s refusal of cognition
Harold Bloom’s rejection of what he called the “critics of resentment” was not, at bottom, political. It was epistemological, though he never named it as such.
By insisting that literary reading is fundamentally aesthetic—and by treating aesthetics as something self-justifying—Bloom effectively rejected the idea that literary texts could function as cognitive instruments. Once you see that, everything else falls into place:
- His hostility to Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and historicist critics was not that they were “reductive,” but that they were making claims about knowledge.
- They treated texts as saying something about the world—power, identity, history, subjectivity—not merely about poetic strength or imaginative mastery.
- That move threatens Bloom’s position, because it demands criteria of validity, not just sensibility.
So he pushed back—not by offering a competing epistemology, but by withdrawing the field of play altogether.
Aesthetic reading as faith, not method
You’re absolutely right about The Western Canon. When Bloom invokes “aesthetic reading,” he never operationalizes it.
He does not say:
- how such reading works,
- what counts as error,
- how disagreement could be adjudicated,
- or why aesthetic judgment should command authority.
Instead, he relies on:
- his immense range,
- his rhetorical power,
- and his charismatic certainty.
In effect, Bloom asks the reader to accept that:
Greatness recognizes greatness.
That is not a theory; it’s an appeal to cultivated intuition. And intuition, however refined, cannot ground a discipline once that discipline has implicitly claimed cognitive authority—as literary studies had by mid-century.
Why Bloom had to reject the new critics
Once critics began treating texts as:
- instruments of cultural cognition,
- engines of historical insight,
- or probes into social reality,
the question of validity became unavoidable. And Bloom wanted no part of that question. To accept it would have meant either:
- articulating standards of epistemic warrant, or
- admitting that interpretation is contestable in ways aesthetics alone cannot settle.
So he dismissed the whole enterprise as resentment.
That dismissal worked rhetorically—especially for readers exhausted by polemic—but it did not engage the real issue. As you say, the critics he opposed were not being reductive because they treated texts as cognitive. They were doing so because they took texts seriously as thinking machines.
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