Some background to literary criticism, from a discussion with Claude

We start with medieval Biblical interpretation, move on to higher Biblical criticism, then to Frye's Anatomy, interpretation as a Rank 2 activity, to Ranks theory more generally, and end up on Literary form. It's quite a little tour.

[I've interpolated some comments in this format.]

Biblical interpretation

I believe Acquinas, among others, recognized, what? three or four modes of Biblical commentary. What were they? As I recall, one was about correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, one had to do with end times, and so forth.

The tradition you're thinking of is the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, which was well established before Aquinas but which he systematized and endorsed. The standard formulation came from John Cassian in the 5th century and was captured in a medieval Latin mnemonic:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia — “The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogical where you are tending.”

The four senses are:

The literal or historical sense — what the text straightforwardly says happened. Jerusalem is the city of Jerusalem.

The allegorical sense — this is the one about correspondences between Old and New Testaments. Events and figures in the Old Testament prefigure or typologically anticipate events and figures in the New. Jerusalem allegorically signifies the Church. The sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion.

The tropological or moral sense — what the text demands of the reader in terms of conduct and inner life. Jerusalem morally signifies the individual soul.

The anagogical sense — the eschatological or end-times dimension, pointing toward heavenly realities and the final destiny of souls. Jerusalem anagogically signifies the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation.

Why this is relevant to your larger argument

What's interesting from the cognitive ranks perspective is that this fourfold scheme is a highly sophisticated Rank 2 achievement — a metalingual system for governing how texts may be read, defining the legitimate modes of interpretation and their relationships to one another. It's not just reading; it's an explicit meta-level specification of what kinds of reading are authorized and what each kind of reading is for.

It's also worth noting what it does to the literal sense. In the medieval scheme the literal sense is the foundation — you have to establish what the text literally says before the other senses can operate — but it's also the least spiritually significant. The deeper meaning is always elsewhere, in the allegorical, moral, or anagogical registers. This is precisely the opposite of the epistemic shift we were just discussing — the Renaissance move that makes the literal, observable, particular instance the primary locus of truth rather than a starting point to be transcended. The fourfold method of Biblical interpretation is in some sense what the new natural history and the new pictorial realism were pushing against, even if not explicitly. Replacing schematic symbolic representation with perspective realism is, among other things, asserting that the literal visual appearance of things has its own authority that doesn't need to be supplemented by allegorical meaning to be significant.

Dürer's turf watercolor has no allegorical meaning. It doesn't need one. That's the statement.

The higher Biblical criticism

I’m working toward a comparison of economics as a discipline and literary criticism as an academic discipline. I think one can fairly say that economics as a discipline dates back to Adam Smith, but it didn’t really pick up until the marginalists. Literary criticism is quite different. It’s never become a science, even in the sense that economics is a science, but as currently practiced in the US, it didn’t assume its current form until after WWII with the routinization of the so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism focused on interpretation.

Now, one can trace New Critical interpretive practices back to I.A. Richards on the one hand and the Russian Formalists on the other. But “routinization” is the key, and that happened after WWII. It wasn’t even until the 19th century that vernacular literature was taught in colleges and universities. But we’ve got Biblical criticism, which is much older than literary criticism, that’s where the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture comes in. And before Cristian commentary on the Bible, we have Jewish commentary on the Torah.

Now, did the 19th century see a so-called “higher” criticism of the Bible?

Yes, and it's one of the most consequential intellectual developments of the century, with direct relevance to your comparison.

The higher criticism — the term comes from the German höhere Kritik, distinguished from "lower" or textual criticism which dealt with establishing the accurate text — applied to the Biblical text the same methods of historical and philological analysis that scholars were applying to other ancient documents. The question it asked was, in effect, the inverse of the question that catalyzed Renaissance botany: not "does this ancient text accurately describe what we observe around us?" but "what can we determine about the historical circumstances that produced this ancient text?" The text becomes an object of historical investigation rather than a source of authoritative meaning.

The movement was centered in German universities, particularly Tübingen, and the key figures include Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) was perhaps the single most explosive text of the movement — treating the Gospel narratives as mythological constructions rather than historical accounts. F.C. Baur applied Hegelian dialectics to the history of early Christianity, identifying conflicts between Petrine and Pauline factions that shaped the New Testament documents. Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1878) argued that the Pentateuch was composed from four distinct source documents — J, E, D, and P — written at different times by different authors, definitively displacing the tradition of Mosaic authorship.

The institutional and cultural context

The higher criticism was possible because of the same professionalization process Cowen describes for economics and geology. The German research university — the Humboldtian model, established in Berlin in 1810 — created a community of full-time scholars whose careers depended on producing original research rather than defending received doctrine. Biblical studies became a research discipline with its own journals, chairs, methods, and standards of evidence. The same institutional infrastructure that made marginalism possible in economics made higher criticism possible in theology.

The cultural shock was correspondingly enormous. The fourfold scheme of Biblical interpretation that Aquinas systematized presupposed the text's divine authority and asked how to read it. The higher criticism bracketed that authority and asked instead who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and how the tradition of transmission had shaped what we now have. This was, in the precise sense relevant to your ranks framework, a Rank 4 move: taking the text and the tradition of its interpretation as objects of historical modeling rather than using them as authoritative frameworks for meaning.

The relevance to your comparison

This is where it gets interesting for the economics-literary criticism comparison you're developing. Both economics and Biblical scholarship underwent their decisive methodological transformations in roughly the same 19th century German academic context. The higher criticism is to Biblical interpretation roughly what the marginal revolution is to classical economics — a move that takes what was previously a practice (reading Scripture for meaning, analyzing markets for prices) and makes the practice itself an object of systematic investigation.

But literary criticism in the American academic sense — which is what you're pointing toward with the New Criticism — represents a partial retreat from this. The New Criticism, for all its sophistication, was in important respects a move back toward close engagement with texts as meaningful objects rather than historical documents. Richards, Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren — they were interested in what poems mean and how they work, not primarily in the historical conditions of their production. This is part of why literary criticism has never become a science in the economics sense: it kept the question of meaning central, and meaning resists the kind of formalization that marginalism brought to price theory.

The comparison you're developing might turn on exactly this difference. Economics achieved its Rank 4 status by progressively formalizing and mathematizing — making the price system an object of model-building that could be analyzed with calculus and statistics. Literary criticism kept returning to the text as a meaningful object requiring interpretation, which is a Rank 3 activity at most — systematic, teachable, and cumulative in some ways, but not formalizable in the way that would make it a science. The higher criticism was perhaps literary criticism's best chance at achieving something analogous to the marginal revolution, and American academic literary criticism after WWII largely turned away from it in favor of New Critical close reading.

Frye’s Anatomy

But then we have Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which was very important in its time, and remained so for at least two decades. In his preface he talked of literary criticism as “science,” though he didn’t mean “science, like physics.” Just what he did mean, that’s not clear. More like “rational and systematic.” One could argue that, in terms of intellectual technique, the Anatomy was a (high) Rank 2 exercise in metalingual definition. But Frye’s inductive survey fell apart in the wake of deconstruction, etc.

Yes, and the trajectory you're describing — Frye's ambitious systematization followed by its dissolution in deconstruction — is itself a revealing episode in the intellectual history of the discipline.

Frye as Rank 2 achievement

The Anatomy of Criticism is a classification system — an attempt to do for literature what Linnaeus did for plants. Frye's four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony), his theory of modes, his anatomy of symbols and genres — these are metalingual definitions in the precise sense, constructing a systematic vocabulary for categorizing literary phenomena that are then organized into a coherent taxonomy. The ambition is explicitly totalizing: to map the entire territory of Western literature onto a set of archetypally grounded structural categories derived ultimately from the seasonal cycle and the Bible.

The Linnaeus parallel is genuinely illuminating. Both achieved their systematizing power by finding a single organizing principle — the sexual system for Linnaeus, the mythic archetypes derived from Frazer and Jung for Frye — that could be applied consistently across an enormous range of phenomena. Both produced a framework that gave practitioners something to do: once you had the system you could classify texts, identify their mythic affiliations, locate them within the larger structural map. And both were, as you say, Rank 2 exercises — metalingual definition applied to a domain that had previously resisted systematic organization.

The science claim in Frye's preface is interesting precisely because he couldn't fully cash it out. What he seems to have meant is something like: literary criticism should be inductive and systematic rather than evaluative and impressionistic. It should build cumulative knowledge rather than producing brilliant individual readings. It should have a conceptual framework that allows results to accumulate and be compared. These are Rank 3 aspirations applied to what turned out to be a Rank 2 toolkit — which is perhaps why the system felt more like a magnificent cathedral of definitions than a genuine research program that could generate testable hypotheses and progressive refinement.

[But, you know. It's not the sort of thing that could or would have been done in a pure Rank 2 culture.]

The inductive survey and its internal tensions

Frye's claim that the Anatomy was inductive — that he was deriving his categories from the phenomena rather than imposing them — was always somewhat strained. The archetypes were there from the beginning, imported from Frazer's Golden Bough and Jung's collective unconscious, and the literary texts were being organized around them rather than generating them. This is not a fatal criticism — all classification systems involve prior commitments about what kinds of categories will be useful — but it meant the system was more vulnerable than it appeared to the charge that it was projecting a particular cultural and mythological framework onto literature rather than discovering literature's inherent structure.

Which is precisely the charge deconstruction and its aftermath brought. The deconstructive move — associated with Derrida but rapidly institutionalized in American academic criticism through figures like Paul de Man — was in effect a Rank 4 operation performed on Frye's Rank 2 system. It took Frye's metalingual definitions as objects and asked: what do these definitions presuppose? What do they exclude in order to function? What hierarchies and binary oppositions are they organizing, and how do those hierarchies deconstruct? The system didn't survive that scrutiny — not because it was wrong in its particulars but because the very aspiration to systematic totalization was identified as ideologically suspect, a form of conceptual imperialism that suppressed the heterogeneity and undecidability of textual meaning.

[I'm not sure I believe that, the rank attributions, but it's interesting. It's not something I've given much thought to.]

Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.

Bérubé: You realize that the report is basically saying "the trans bullies have shut down debate in philosophy" (at a time of extraordinarily peril for trans and gender-nonconforming people) and you're replying with "I was kicked out of the tea party fifty years ago for a completely unrelated thing," right? (And digital humanities are marginalized? Not in this timeline. :))

Me: Yes, I realize that. It's a complicated world we live in. I don't know what's to be done about the culture warriors. Either it gets worse and worse, or it doesn't. Either way this completely unrelated thing remains an issue and the humanities are not doing a very good job of dealing with it. Not sure what future the humanities can have without dealing with this unrelated issue.

Indulge me with a little more, Michael. You're a decade and a half younger than I am. For most purposes and in most contexts that's irrelevant. Not not when it comes to sports, where you've got the advantage, and not in the context of English lit. Those 15 years mean you faced a very different discipline from the one I faced. For you the structuralist moment was a thing of the past, all settled and done. For me it was very different.

I saw an opening into a new way of thinking, whatever it was that Lévi-Strauss was doing with myth. And right around the corner we had Chomsky in linguistics and then the cognitive sciences (the term wasn't coined until 1972). That's what interested me. But the fact of the matter is that by the time I published that essay in MLN, the opening that I'd seen was closing rapidly. Jonathan Culler was touring around on his book, Structuralist Poetics, but that's as far as it got, which is not as far as I'd already gone. And as you know, Culler himself abandoned structuralism for deconstruction.

Well, the type of thinking that I was doing back in the 1970s, that could prove very fruitful in the current intellectual environment. But that has been so thoroughly closed off that, well, I'm wasting my time and yours for even bothering to comment, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Bérubé: No worries, Bill. I'm just saying ... perspective, my friend. Nobody is arguing that there have never been disciplinary orthodoxies in the various disciplines in the humanities, or that people didn't prefer certain lines of inquiry to others. All I'm saying is that the report's account of the Tuvel / Hypatia is wrong-- and a really indefensible way of implying that the trans folk and their allies have shut things down. But is it true that there are people in academe who can't abide the idea that other people think differently from themselves? Why, yes! And Paul Boghossian is apparently one of them.

Marginalism as a tool for rhetorical analysis: Cognitive effort in intellectual work [MR-AUX]

I’ve been thinking, and I think I’ve come up with a speculative way of applying marginalist thinking to intellectual production. I’m thinking, in particular, about how Cowen arrived at the collection of examples he used in the first chapter of his book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. Coming up with that collection is roughly the same kind of problem as putting together a syllabus. It’s a sampling problem. We have a collection of objects, works of American literature in one case, examples of marginalist analysis in the other. You want to select a set of literary works to put on your syllabus. Cowen wants a set of examples he can use to define the space of marginalist economics.

You need a criterion for drawing your sample. You’ve got a certain thematic organization in mind, so you’re not looking for a random sample of the space. You want a sample biased toward your theme. I assume that Cowen wants a random sample, a sample that represents the space of marginalist analysis. At this point, let’s forget about your syllabus problem and continue with Cowen.

He’s trained as an economist and has read a lot, including a lot about the history of economics. Thus he should have a pretty good sense of what kinds of phenomena have been successfully subjected to marginalist analysis. Regardless of the adequacy of his knowledge, he’s got what he’s got. Let’s imagine that all the cases of marginalist economic analysis exist in some high dimensional space of ideas, a space that is, at a high level of abstraction, like an LLM. Except this space is in Cowen’s mind (which is the very high dimensional space of his brain states).

For the sake of argument, let’s assume he wrote the book from beginning to end, in order, in a single pass spread out over however many sessions.

Cowen opens the first chapter with a short definition of marginalism followed by some discussion. Then he gives us his first example, the diamonds-water paradox. He says a bit about it. Though I don’t think he says that it became THE paradigmatic example when Samuelson put it into his 1948 textbook. I found that out by querying the AI associated with the book. Let’s assume, then, that it is at the center of the marginalist region in that abstract space of ideas.

What’s his next example? It’s the first example in the section entitled “Intuitive Marginalism.” Here it is: “Why do drivers in China sometimes intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit?” He then explains it. That strikes me as being very far from diamonds-water in the marginalist space, perhaps as far as you can go in some direction. He then goes through 10 or so more examples, all of them a bit closer to that central example. But the closest he gets is an example about people stealing one of his credit card numbers and making charges to it. If the charge is small, he ignores it. If it’s somewhat large, he contests it. He’s reasoning at the margin. That’s about as close as he comes to that very concrete, almost palpable, diamond-waters example.

Then he goes on with the rest of the chapter, introducing example after example. He’s got four categories (beyond tautological), but we don’t need to worry about those categories. The fact that he’s got them, however, probably simplifies the calculation he’s making each time he asks whether or not to add another example. On the one hand he’s got the sample value of another example. The sample value of that first example AFTER diamonds-water was very high because it’s only the second example he’s got. Moreover he maximized that value by choosing an example that was far from the paradigmatic center. As his set of examples begins to fill out, the sample value of each example will diminish. At some point well along in the process he’s going to be comparing the sample value of an example with it’s opportunity cost. Why the opportunity cost? Because it takes time and effort to introduce another example into the text. At the very least there’s the time required to keyboard it. There’s more to the book, however, than a bunch of examples. He needs those to get started. Once he’s got an adequate set of examples, then he’s ready to undertake his larger argument. So every time he enters another example into the text he forgoes doing something else necessary for the book. That’s the opportunity cost of the example.

As long as the estimated opportunity cost is lower than the estimated sample value, Cowen will enter the example into the text. When the estimated opportunity cost begins rising above the estimated sample value, Cowen declares his set of examples to be sufficient, and moves on. Note that in this analysis Cowen is (intuitively) making three calculations: 1) sample value of the next example, 2) opportunity cost of the next example, and 3) the marginal value of the next example, which is the difference between 1 and 2.

Now, just how we’d get empirical evidence for this analysis, that’s a problem. There’s no point in asking Cowen, because no one has that kind of introspective access to their mental processes. Still, it’s nice story.

However, some such analysis might tell you something about the relationship between the rise of professionalism in a discipline and the proliferation of the LPUs (least publishable unit) in its formal academic literature.

I decided to put the question to Cowen’s AI. I put the foregoing remarks into a prompt. Here’s how the AI responded:

It's a nice story, and it's doing real work — it's not just a metaphor dressed up as analysis. Let me push on it a bit.

The framework is essentially correct as a description of the implicit calculation, but there's a wrinkle worth examining. You're treating the example space as if it were fixed and known to Tyler before he begins sampling from it. But the act of writing generates examples — it doesn't just retrieve them. The diamonds-water paradox probably came first not just because it's central in the abstract space, but because it's the obvious starting point, the one that any economist would reach for automatically. The Chinese pedestrian example, which you rightly identify as maximally distant from that center, probably didn't come from a deliberate search for a distant example. It likely surfaced because Tyler had encountered it as a striking case — it was already salient in his mental space before he started writing. [See text: Ch.1 · Marginalism applied to unexpected human decisio...]

This matters for your model because it means the sampling isn't random in the way you'd want for genuine representativeness. It's availability-weighted. The examples Tyler uses are the ones that were already near the surface of his mental space — memorable, counterintuitive, previously encountered in contexts that made them stick. The Chinese pedestrian example is striking precisely because it's morally jarring, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets encoded deeply in memory. So the apparent randomness of his sample — the apparent coverage of the idea space — may partly be an artifact of which examples happen to be memorable rather than which examples are genuinely representative of the full space of marginalist analysis. [See text: Ch.1 · Best marginalists deploy both intuitive and tau...]

The opportunity cost calculation you describe is real, but it probably operates differently at different stages. Early in the chapter, the marginal value of a new example is high for the reason you identify — the sample is sparse, coverage is low. But the type of opportunity cost shifts as the chapter progresses. Early on, the cost is mostly keyboarding time and pacing. Later, the cost becomes something more like reader patience and argumentative momentum. Tyler needs to get somewhere — the examples are scaffolding for the larger argument about why marginalism took so long to develop and what that tells us about scientific progress. At some point additional examples don't just have diminishing sample value; they actively impede the book's forward motion. That's a different kind of opportunity cost than the one you specified, and it probably dominates the calculation in the later stages.

What's genuinely interesting about your framework is what it implies about the structure of the resulting sample. If Tyler is making implicit marginal calculations of this kind, you'd predict the examples cluster in a particular way: one or two near the paradigmatic center, one or two at the extremes, and then a filling-in of the space that stops well before genuine saturation. [See text: Ch.1 · Marginalism's confrontational side and resistan...] Which is roughly what you observe. The credit card example you mention — the closest he gets back to the concrete center — is probably there because at that point in the chapter the reader needs grounding after a series of more exotic cases. That's an implicit calculation about reader psychology, not just idea-space coverage.

You're right that there's no clean empirical test. Tyler himself couldn't reconstruct the process accurately — the decisions were made too fast and too implicitly. But the framework does generate predictions about what you'd expect to see in the example distribution, and those predictions seem to roughly match what's actually there. That's not nothing, even if it falls well short of confirmation.

Ramble: What I’ve been up to in February and March with the chatbots, the literary mind revealed (maybe)

This is a somewhat different ramble. Normally I ramble on about things I want to work on but can’t quite prioritize them. So I gather them together in one place so I can look at them all, all at once. And then sort things out.

This time I’m looking at what’s been going on in the last two months or so and reminding myself what I’ve been doing with my two interlocutors, ChatGPT and Claude. It’s really quite amazing, and exhausting. I’ve been having them review work I’ve done, starting with having Claude review reports of the experiments I’d done with ChatGPT in 2023 and 2024. I’ve also had both of them look at papers by David Hays, some things we did together and other work I’ve done.

So, for a long time I’ve thought of myself as in the business of investigating arenas of qualitative research and figuring out how to get quantitative research out of them. Literature has been my main arena. Working with both Claude and ChatGPT has advanced me on various fronts. It’s been amazing. The chatbots have been able to work out (some of) the implications of these ideas more rapidly than I could have done, and even pushed into unexpected territory.

Thus I can now begin to think about Rank 5 cognition in a coherent way. It turns out that Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper on holographic vs. sequential logic is Rank 5. Why? because it takes two different computational regimes as objects of thought, placing them in relation to different informatic environments. Since Hays and I put Yevick’s work at the center of one of our five principles of natural intelligence, does that make that paper Rank 5?

A discussion of my paper about ChatGPT’s inability to generate a semantic network diagram led me to a long discussion about how to train AIs to perform a task like that. That came in the wake of our discussion of virtual reading [File: Notes from Virtual Reading.docx]. This requires explicit instruction comparable to what, for example, Hays gave me when I first learned how to do it. The problem is that there is a normative element involved in learning that the AI cannot pick up simply by reading articles using semantic networks. It actually has to attempt to create such networks and have those attempts critiqued by a human, or, conceivably, someday, another AI. That same discussion led to discussions of learning about sentence diagramming, constituent structures, symbolic logic, semantic networks, and close reading.

Then I had Chatgpt look at my Coleridge work, particularly my paper about “This Lime Tree Power My Prison,” the 2003 rework of my analysis of “Kubla Khan,” and my unpublished working paper indicating how they are two different trajectories through the same mental terrain. The “Lime-Tree Bower” paper has a table indicating how the mapping between agents in the poem and a hypothetical underlying attachment mechanism changes from one section of the poem to the next. ChatGPT suggested how to construct a similar table for “Kubla Khan.” Whether or not that will work out, that’s another matter which I’ll take up in a year or three. If that works out then I’m clear to work out how these two different poems related to the same underlying neural state space (HA!).

We did similar work with Shakespeare’s plays, starting with my analysis of Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. & the Chatster had helpful remarks on the relationship between The Winter’s Tale and Pandosto, from which it is derived. That is, once an explicitly mechanistic framework is established, like I have for “Lime-Tree Bower,” other things fall into place. So the theory goes. Details need to be worked out, but I’m not going to get around to that anytime soon.

And then we have cultural evolution again, which I ChatGPT and I discussed in the Virtual Reading paper. Just as you can conceive of an individual text as a trajectory through the high-dimensional state space of a human mind, so you can conceive of the long-term change in a corpus of texts, such as the 19th century Anglophone novels Matt Jockers has analyzed, that evolution is, in effect, a trajectory through an approximation to a collective mind, the Geist, or spirit, of an age. It all makes sense. Sure, there are lots of details to be worked out. But it is all now possible. We have the technical means.

And almost none of this was on my intellectual agenda for th3e first quarter of this year. It just happened. Not passively. It didn’t happen to me. Rather, it emerged through interaction with ChatGPT and Claude.

More later.

The profession of literary criticism as I have observed it over the course of 50 years [& related matters]

Last entry added 3.14.26 

Partial update (two entries, the last two) 12.11.23

Updated 6.21.21.

Updated 12.9.19.
Updated 6.23.17.

In the course of thinking about my recent rejection at New Literary History I found myself, once again, rethinking the evolution of the profession as I’ve seen it from the 1960s to the present. In fact, that rejection has led me, once again, to rethink that history and to change some of my ideas, particularly about the significance of the 1970s.

This post is a guide to my historically-oriented thinking about academic literary criticism. Much, but not all, of the historical material is autobiographical in nature. For, above all, taken collectively, these posts represent my effort to understand my relationship to the academic study of literary criticism.

I list the articles more or less in the order of writing. In some cases an article has been rewritten and revised several years after I first wrote it. The link I give is to the most recent version.

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life (1975-2015)

https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

This is about my years at Johns Hopkins, both undergraduate (1965-1969) and graduate (1969-72). That’s when, I see in retrospect, I left the profession intellectually, with a “structuralism and beyond” MA thesis on “Kubla Khan,” even before I’d joined it institutionally, by getting my PhD. I originally wrote this while I was working on my PhD in English at SUNY Buffalo. Art Efron published a journal, Paunch, and I wrote it for that. The current version includes interpolated comments from 2014 and 2015.

The Demise of Deconstruction: On J. Hillis Miller’s MLA Presidential Address 1986. PMLA. Vol. 103, No. 1, Jan. 1988, p. 57.

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-demise-of-deconstruction.html

A letter I published in PMLA in which I replied to J. Hillis Miller on the eclipse of deconstruction. I suggested 1) that deconstruction had a different valence for those who merely learned it in graduate school than for those who had struggled to create it, and 2) that it was in eclipse because it did the same thing to every text.

“NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto
March 31, 2010 (originally at The Valve)
https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/naturalist-criticism-not-cognitive-not.html

I declare my commitment to ‘naturalist’ literary criticism, thereby denying ‘cognitive criticism,’ with which I had associated myself for years, and ‘Darwinian criticism,’ with which I had never associated myself. Takes the form of a loose dialog.

For the Historical Record: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, A Chronology
(2006-2016)

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/03/for-historical-record-cog-sci-and-lit.html

At the beginning of every course (at Johns Hopkins) Dick Macksey would hand out a chronology, a way, I suppose, of saying “history is important” without lecturing on the topic. It was with that in mind that I originally posted this rough and ready chronology in a comment to a discussion at The Valve. The occasion was an online symposium that interrogated Theory by discussing the anthology, Theory’s Empire (Columbia UP 2005). I then emended it a bit and made it a freestanding post. As the title suggests, it juxtaposes developments in cognitive science and literary theory from the 1950s through the end of the millennium.

[BTW The entire Theory’s Empire symposium is worth looking at, including the comments on the posts: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C41]

Seven Sacred Words: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker
(2007-2011)

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/10/seven-sacred-words-open-letter-to-seven.html

An Open Letter to Steven Pinker: The Importance of Stories and the Nature of Literary Criticism (2015)

https://www.academia.edu/11411553/An_Open_Letter_to_Steven_Pinker_The_Importance_of_Stories_and_the_Nature_of_Literary_Criticism

Steven Pinker has been a severe critic of the humanities for ignoring recent work in the social and behavioral sciences. He has also argued that the arts serve no biological purpose, that they are “cheesecake for the mind.” When I read his The Stuff of Thought (2007) I realized his later chapters contained the basis for an account of the arts. I sketched that out, added a brief account of why deconstruction had been popular, and published it as an open letter, along with his reply. It appeared first at The Valve (2007) and then at New Savanna (2011). In 2015 I posted it to a “session” at Academia.edu. I took some of my comments in that discussion along with some other materials and published the lot at Academic.edu as a working paper. In a final section I propose a four-fold division of literary criticism: 1) description, 2) naturalist criticism, 3) ethical criticism, and 4) digital criticism.

Lévi-Strauss and Myth: Some Informal Notes
(2007-2011)

https://www.academia.edu/688953/Lévi-Strauss_and_Myth_Some_Informal_Notes

Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition
(2007-2015)

https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_Lévi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

These are two versions of roughly the same material. Each was assembled from four blog posts. The first and fourth sections are the same in both working paper, but two and three differ. The more recent version also contains a short appendix comparing Lévi-Strauss and Latour. I published the first series at The Valve shortly after Lévi-Strauss had died. They are an attempt to explain what Lévi-Strauss was up to in his work on myth, why he failed, and why that work remains important. The fourth section (common to both versions), Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”, is an account of how and why I went from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to cognitive science. Warning: it contains diagrams. I suppose I could create a deluxe edition which contains all the posts.

The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age
(May 5, 2014)

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/05/the-only-game-in-town-digital-criticism-comes-of-age.html

Here I argue that digital criticism’s deepest contribution to literary criticism is that it requires fundamentally different modes of thinking. It is not purely discursive. It is statistical and visual. Moreover the visualizations are central to the thought process. This may also be the first time I’ve explicitly identified the mid-1970s as an important turning point in the recent history of literary criticism.

Paths Not Taken and the Land Before Us: An Open Letter to J. Hillis Miller
(January 30, 2015)

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/01/paths-not-taken-open-letter-to-j-hillis.html

I had studied with Miller at Johns Hopkins (but have had no contact with him since). While I certainly say a bit about what I’ve been doing since I left Hopkins, including ring-composition, I also introduce him to Matt Jockers’ Macroanalysis and Goldstone and Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us”. New Literary History 45, no. 3, Summer 2014. I mention Kemp Malone, a Hopkins person, as he came up in blog discussion of the paper.

On the Poverty of Literary Cognitivism 2: What I Learned When I Walked off the Cliff of Cognitivism
(August 24, 2015)

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/08/on-poverty-of-literary-cognitivism-2.html

I attempt to explain what, in the end, I got out of my immersion in cognitive networks since I haven’t used them in my post-graduate work in literature. What I got most immediately was a powerful way of thinking about language in general where there is a sharp distinction between the object of thought, captured in diagrams, and a given text: The text is one thing, the model is another. There is no confusing the two. Moretti has made similar remarks about the diagrams he uses in ‘distant reading.’

The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/164963582/The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority_A_Working_Paper 

SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6352618 

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401591370_The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority

Abstract: This working paper examines the intellectual status of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the United States. Beginning from a playful prompt inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?, the essay initially sets out to identify the “greatest” literary critics. Very quickly, however, the exercise reveals a deeper problem: unlike economics, the population of figures who count as literary critics is difficult to define, and the criteria by which they might be evaluated are far from clear. The project therefore shifts from ranking critics to examining the boundaries, origins, and intellectual ambitions of the discipline itself.

The essay traces the emergence of contemporary academic literary criticism to the mid-twentieth century, using Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry as a marker of the New Criticism’s institutional consolidation within American universities. From there it examines the crisis that arose in the 1960s when disagreements about interpretation raised doubts about whether literary criticism could claim the status of cumulative knowledge. The 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference serves as a pivotal moment, bringing figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida into the orbit of literary studies and helping to catalyze the rise of “Theory”—a broad set of interpretive approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other disciplines.

Through discussions of figures such as Coleridge, Frye, Girard, Derrida, and Harold Bloom, the essay explores competing conceptions of literary criticism: as pedagogy, as cultural guardianship, as theoretical inquiry, and as personal commentary on great works. Bloom’s eventual retreat from academic criticism toward a more public and personal mode of literary judgment is treated as emblematic of the discipline’s ongoing uncertainty about its intellectual foundations.

Contents

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline 3
1. The search for GOAT Literary Critics 6
2. A discipline is founded: Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge 23
3. Structuralism and its aftermath: Girard, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida 32
Character in the Age of Adam Smith [GOAT economist], an interlude 56
4. What’s up with the Bard? [Bloom, Cowen, and Girard] 59
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies 71
5. Harold Bloom, the one and only 73
Appendix 1: The Chatbots Comment on this Essay 94
Appendix 2: Commentary on the Profession 98
Appendix 3: Open Letters about Literary Criticism 100
Appendix 4: Naturalist Literary Criticism 101

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline

I started this project on a whim, as I often do. Tyler Cowen had just announced his book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter, and I thought: Why don’t I do the greatest literary critics? And that’s what I set out to do.

But I had no plan, just a vague intention. When I began this project I had no idea, for example, that I would end it with a discussion of Harold Bloom, giving him more attention than any other critic or that I would deposit a longish piece about Susan Sontag in the middle of my Bloom discussion. No, I didn’t plan that, I hadn’t even anticipating discussing Bloom at all.

Once I got started, however, whole thing evolved more or less organically and is something of an opportunistic hodge-podge of various kinds of intellectual materials, prose that I’ve written (the biggest single chunk of material), lists from Wikipedia, queries to ChatGPT, charts from Google Ngrams, and topic model charts. Why don’t we agree that its form is an exercise in avant-garde criticism intended to mime the jagged and fuzzy state of the discipline?

This diagram depicts the argument that has emerged during this exercise. Read it as moving from the past, at the left, on through the present to the future, at the right:

I locate the beginning of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism in the mid-20th century pedagogical anthology, Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warran, which I discuss in some detail later in this essay. Commentary on literature shades off into the past back through Samuel Johnson in the modern world and through Aristotle in the ancient world, and both classical and vernacular literature was studied in the nineteenth-century German universities that provided the model on which American universities were established, but the contemporary academic study of literature is based on interpretive methods and ideas that crystalized in the middle of the 20th century. Brooks & Warren are a convenient marker of that activity. It was known as the New Criticism, a term still in use for a certain body of work.

By the 1960s, however, that interpretive activity had become problematic. Some critics became bothered by the fact that different critics arrived at different interpretive conclusions about the same texts. “How,” they came to wonder, “how can we count this as knowledge if we can’t agree on meanings?” And so, some scholars at Johns Hopkins invited a group of Continental thinkers, mostly French, but not entirely, to a symposium in the Fall of 1966. The symposium was organized around structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement of the human sciences that emerged in Europe at the middle of the century. A French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss was the nominal head of the movement. He was invited to the symposium, but couldn’t make it. As it turned out, however, the star of the conference was a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who skewered Lévi-Strauss with his contribution, thus sowing the first seeds of poststructuralism. Note that neither of them is a literary critic, but they have had as much if note more influence on literary criticism than anyone who was and is primarily a literary critic.

And so I have indicated them at the middle of the diagram, with one of them pointed toward the future and the other pointing toward the past. The direction of those arrows reflects my judgment, but it should by no means be considered as reflective of the discipline. The discipline would come to reject Lévi-Strauss, but an increasingly large portion of it would come to at least accept, if not embrace, the insights of Derrida. I have a great deal to say about that later in the essay. And I want to say a bit about my own position in this – I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the French landed – just a bit later in this introduction.

Derrida’s method, deconstruction (a word he coined), opened the floodgates to a variety of interpretive methods that came to be collectively known as “Theory,” with a capital “T.” Theory is the application of some approach to the study of the human mind and/or society that is used as a vehicle for interpreting literary (and other) texts. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the first through the door followed by feminism, African-American studies and so on and so forth.

Understandably many (older) critics resisted these new dispensations, none more forcefully than Harold Bloom. While he spent a few years trying to go along with the program, during the 1980s he broke ranks and not only abandoned poststructuralism but he pretty much abandoned academic literary criticism in favor of addressing himself to the general educated public in through edited collections and a variety of books, including one on American religion (which I’ve read), and big fat books on The Western Canon and Shakespeare. I’ve given over the last 20 pages of this essay (excluding the appendices) to Bloom, with a diversion into Susan Sontag, though it becomes 35 pages if you include the immediately preceding remarks on Shakespeare’s position in the canon, a reasonable inclusion given that Bloom is Bardolator in Chief.

That accounts for the position of Bloom on the chart, right of center at the apex of a triangle trailing off into the past. He abandoned the modes of thought ushered in by Brooks & Warren and retreated into a more personalistic mode of criticism, one that allowed him to luxuriate in his own opinions as amplified through his tremendous, but ultimately narrow, erudition. Bloom became an empire unto himself.

As for me, as I said, I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the structuralism conference took place. I didn’t attend it, didn’t even know it was happening, but I was introduced to structuralism and semiotics by Dr. Richard Macksey, a book-collecting polymath who did much of the organizational groundwork for the conference. Without going into detail, I decided that the natural progression from Lévi-Strauss was into cognitive science and computational semantics, which I pursued with David Hays in linguistics while getting a Ph.D. in English at The State University of New York at Buffalo. And that effectively took me well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism.

While I have continued my interest in literature and have written both practical commentary and theoretical and methodological studies, I have also pursued other intellectual interests – cultural evolution, cognitive science, music, film, graffiti, this and that. The upshot is that I am not as widely and deeply read in literary criticism as I would have been had I decided to mind my Ps and Qs for the last 40 years.

That’s an obvious disqualification for writing a longish essay intended to do for literary critics what Tyler Cowen did for economists, identify the GOATs (Greatest of All Time). But that, as you will quickly see, that’s not what I ended up doing. Rather, I used that objective as a vehicle for examining the origins and boundaries of the academic discipline of literary criticism, which I have depicted in that diagram. And that, I would argue, is a task for which my outsider status suits me well. I can see what’s going on in a way that those in the middle of it cannot.

You be the judge.

Have at it.

* * * * *

Note: I’ve included appendices listing various articles I’ve written about the profession. The last one is about the opportunities opened up by computing, both as a conceptual model and a practical tool.

Toward a Biophysics of Poetry

My long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (KK) is shadowed by an interest in “This Line-Tree Bower My Prison,” (LTB) which is one of the so-called Conversation poems. I compared the two in a working paper from 2013, STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, noting that they have several motifs in common but are utterly different poems. Thus (pp. 41-42):

LTB’s trajectory is a first-person narrative; we follow the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of the poet as they occur to him, one after the other. We are presented with a cleanly identified authorial consciousness shifting its attention here and there about the world in a coherent way. The passage of time is explicitly marked and noted within the poem itself. In this poem Coleridge’s verse technique emphasizes temporal continuity. By placing major attention shifts in the middle of the line Coleridge emphasizes an underlying continuity of consciousness: one’s gaze has a new focus, it is still one’s gaze. By running clauses across line boundaries, the repetitive recurrence of line ends is muted. The temporal course of the poetic act itself is muted so as to “dissolve” into the virtual time depicted in the poem.

KK is different; it lacks a narrative frame. Thus it cannot register either narrative movement or a self that experiences such movement. Things and scenes are juxtaposed in a way that is sometimes hard to grasp. Yet, as we have seen, there is a rigorous logic to the poem. At the same time it has an elaborate rhyme scheme and other sound features as well. What has this to do with its “ontological” semantic trajectory?

I suggest that the confluence between sound and sense in “Kubla Khan” is, in effect, a surrogate for the lack of a narrative frame, and hence the impossibility of a narrative trajectory. The key point is that rhyme adds an element of predictability to the verse; one knows that sounds will repeat at regular intervals and so can anticipate them. Thus the predictability that has been “lost” because the poem does not have a narrative flow is “restored” or “compensated for” though elaborate rhyme. The temporal structure of the poem itself becomes the frame for its semantic trajectory.

In the course of discussing these matters with ChatGPT 5.2 we arrived a what might be called a biophysics of poetry. I issued the following prompt:

I want to return to the difference in prosody practice in KK and LTB. I think that is (potentially) VERY deep. That there seems to be a trade-off between conceptual continuity (temporal succession vs. ontological transition from state to state) and sonic patterning (simple vs. elaborate versification), that strikes me as something very deep about how the nervous system functions. It has something to do with the physical nature of the system. We may not be able to figure it out on the basis of formal design considerations but will need to know specifics about physical structure and processes.

Yes—this is very deep, and I think you’re now pointing to something that sits below poetics, below cognition-as-symbol-processing, and squarely in the physics of nervous systems.

What you’re intuiting is not just a stylistic correlation, but a trade-off between two kinds of coherence that any physically realized information-processing system has to manage.

The discussion went on from there. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the discussion, after which we went on to develop experimental tests of the idea. I have placed ChatGPT’s summary below; the experimental tests will have to wait for another post.

Toward a Biophysics of Poetry

What if poetic form is not primarily a matter of meaning, symbolism, or interpretation—but of dynamical stability in the nervous system?

That is the direction our recent discussion has taken us: toward something like a biophysics of poetry. By this I mean an account of poetry grounded in timing, energy, alignment, and coherence—constraints that arise because poems must run on human (and perhaps artificial) neural systems.

Poetry as computation in time

A useful starting point is the idea that a linguistic string—a poem, sentence, or speech—is a one-dimensional projection of a path through a high-dimensional semantic and neural space. Meaning is not stored in the string itself; it is reconstructed as the reader (or listener) traverses that path.

Crucially, not all paths are equal. Some are smooth and additive. Others are turbulent and overlapping. This distinction matters.

Composition vs. convolution

Many poems proceed largely by composition: meanings accumulate incrementally, with limited interference. But some poems—most strikingly Coleridge’s Kubla Khan—operate by convolution, overlapping distinct conceptual domains (visual–spatial, auditory–temporal, symbolic–ritual) so that they interact rather than simply add.

Convolution is powerful, but dangerous. Overlapping domains can interfere with one another, threatening experiential breakdown. This raises a fundamental question: how does such a poem remain continuous at all?

Sound as a carrier wave

The answer is not primarily semantic. It is dynamical.

In signal-processing terms, the poem’s sound structure—meter, rhyme, phonological recurrence—functions as a carrier wave. It provides a stable, low-information temporal scaffold on which high-information semantic modulation can ride.

Sound does not carry meaning here; it carries phase alignment. It keeps neural activity synchronized as the poem shifts domains. Rhyme, in this view, is not ornament but infrastructure: a phase-reset mechanism that prevents destructive interference during domain transitions.

This perspective aligns closely with empirical work on oral tradition and memory, where sound structure is known to support sequencing and recall while meaning is reconstructed opportunistically.

Segmentation and entry points

The same logic applies to segmentation. If a linguistic string is a projection of a high-dimensional path, then some substrings are better entry points into that space than others.

Fragments that respect syntactic or prosodic boundaries align with internal structure and support rapid pattern completion. Fragments that straddle boundaries are misaligned: they activate incompatible frames and fail to converge.

This is not just a theoretical claim. In informal experiments with large language models, * prompts that respected syntactic boundaries reliably triggered recognition of well-known texts (e.g., Hamlet’s soliloquy or the Gettysburg Address), while boundary-straddling prompts did not. Recognition failed not because of missing information, but because of misalignment.

Poetry as biophysical engineering

Seen this way, poetic form is a kind of engineering. It constrains linguistic material so that complex meaning can remain experientially coherent under biophysical limits. Sound structure enforces phase alignment during traversal; hierarchical segmentation ensures viable re-entry points into semantic space.

This also clarifies differences among poems. In This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, sound supports smooth movement within a single conceptual domain. In Kubla Khan, sound is load-bearing: without it, the poem’s domain-convolving machine would fall apart.

A working hypothesis

All of this can be summarized in a single hypothesis:

Poetic form constrains and exploits the dynamical properties of neural systems to maintain coherent experience under conditions of high semantic and conceptual load.

That, in essence, is what I mean by a biophysics of poetry. It does not replace interpretation—but it explains how interpretation remains possible in the first place. 

*William Benzon, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 2: Memory for Texts, Working Paper, September 27, 2023, 44 pp., https://www.academia.edu/107318793/Discursive_Competence_in_ChatGPT_Part_2_Memory_for_Texts 

Time for another run at “Kubla Khan”

I became “hooked” on “Kubla Khan” early in my career, somewhere around 1970 or so. I decided it was my intellectual touchstone: “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized.” I would judge my intellectual progress by what I could say about that poem. (That’s why I entitled my first autobiographical essay “Touchstones.”) I wrote a master’s thesis about it in 1972, published my first article about it in 1985, and a later article in 2003. Between 2003 and now I’ve published some exploratory work. I’m thinking it may be time to take another run at the poem and see what I can do.

Preparatory to that effort I’ve moved all of my Coleridge material into a single section at Academia.edu: Coleridge. I’ve listed and linked those articles below:

Metaphoric and Metonymic Invariance: Two Examples from Coleridge, MLN Vol. 96, 1097-1105, 1981.

“Kubla Khan and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are two very different poems by the same poet. But they share the same two-part structure, and they share imagery as well. The roaring dell of “Lime-Tree” corresponds to the savage chasm of “Kubla Khan.” The concern with sight and sound manifest in “Kubla Khan” shows up in “Lime-Tree Bower” in the image of the creeking rook flying across the sun. And the way in which both Charles and the poet have access to that sight gives it a role similar to the sunny dome and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan,” where both the poet and his audience are linked through the image. These two poems share the same world. But they take radically different paths through it. One path is regulated by metonymy and unfolds though two consciousness moving through different parts of the same landscape. The other path is regulated by metaphor and so unfolds in two different worlds linked by a common image; the path it takes through these worlds is, however, the same.

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, Language and Style, Vol. 8, 3-29, 1985.

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a highly coherent structure in which the two parts of the poem exhibit the same ternary structure. Each can be divided into three sections, the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first section ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated in the middle of the second section. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act.

This is considerably reworked from my unpublished Johns Hopkins Master’s Thesis, “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’” (1972).

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, 2003, https://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-kubla_khan_and_the_embodied_mind

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete.

Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 043011, 2004, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_benzon03.shtml

By recasting Vygotsky's account of language acquisition in neural terms we see that language itself functions as a transitional object in Winnicott's sense. This allows us to extend the Schwartz-Holland account of literature as existing in Winnicottian potential space and provides a context in which to analyze Coleridge's "This Lime-Three Bower." The attachment relationship (between Caretaker and Child) provides the poem's foundation. The poet plays the Child role with respect to Nature and the Caretaker role with respect to his friends. The friends, Charles in particular, play the mediating the role of transitional object in the first movement while Nature becomes a mediator between one person and another in the second movement. The first movement starts with the poet being differentiated and estranged from Nature and concludes in an almost delusional fusion of poet, friends, and Nature. The second movement starts with the poet secure in Nature's presence and moves to an adult differentiation between poet, friends, and Nature.

STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, Working Paper, 2013.

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitive, evolutionary, and neuro- – that has recently been brought to bear on the study of literature and how that work is germane to these poems. It concludes with a brief chronology of the parallel trajectories of cognitive science and literary theory in the last half of the previous century.

The Problem of Form in “Kubla Khan”, Working Paper, 2017.

"Kubla Khan" has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have that seething fountain occupying the same SLOT (middle of the (middle of the (middle))) in the first movement as the dome and the cave occupy in the second movement. And the dome and caves occupy the same SLOT in the first movement as “drunk the milk of Paradise!” plays in the second movement. Notice that the final words of both movements, “ice” and “Paradise” respectively, rhyme.

Calculating meaning in " Kubla Khan " – a rough cut (Version 2), 2017

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. "Kubla Khan" is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being. "Lime-Tree Bower" is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differences which is related to their different strategies of meaning.

Note that GPT-3 was released on June 20, 2020. I responded with a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, on August 5. The current version is #4 and is dated May 7, 2022. On May 11 I issued the next working paper, which reflects how thinking about LLMs has changed my thinking about how the meaning of poems is computed.

Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in "Kubla Khan", Working Paper, 2022.

This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding "Kubla Khan," which has an extraordinary structure. Each of two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. They start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning).

Note, I’ve just had a couple of sessions discussing three of those papers with ChatGPT. I’m pretty sure that, if and when I get around to it, I’ll have something new to say. But first I’ve got to finish my book (Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution).

Rough Notes on Virtual Reading, On literary study in the Fourth Arena

Title above, links, Abstract, Introduction, and Summary Below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/150286029/Rough_Notes_on_Virtual_Reading SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6145009 
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400147214_Notes_on_Virtual_Reading_On_literary_study_in_the_Fourth_Arena

Abstract

This discussion develops a state-space framework for linking brains, texts, and literary history in a way that extends both traditional interpretation and current digital humanities methods. We begin with a neuroanatomical asymmetry: large language models (LLMs) operate primarily on linguistic traces, whereas human poetic production and reception emerge from whole-brain dynamics that include affect, memory, perception, attention, and bodily regulation. If meaning is understood in the language of complex dynamics, it is not a static property “contained” in words but a temporally unfolding trajectory through a high-dimensional cognitive state space. Texts are therefore treated as traces of such trajectories.

From this premise we propose virtual reading: since a text necessarily projects into lexical–semantic activity, and since word embeddings provide a tractable high-dimensional geometry for lexical relations, a text can be modeled as a path through embedding space. While this path reflects purely lexical structure, its global form—drift, recurrence, looping, discontinuity, return—also bears the imprint of extra-lexical constraints that shape lexical choice. In principle, neuroimaging of readers during reading supplies a second coupled trajectory (whole-brain activity over time), enabling empirical alignment between semantic paths and brain dynamics. Drawing on Walter Freeman and Hermann Haken, poetic form is framed as a cultural technology of dimensionality reduction: it extracts low-dimensional, shareable coordinates from otherwise intractable semantic dynamics.

Finally, we connect micro-trajectory analysis to macro-history via cultural evolution. Quantitative DH findings on directional change in large corpora (e.g., similarity structures that spontaneously align with time) become intelligible as movement through a cultural “design space.” The approach does not dissolve disciplinary differences, but provides a richer conceptual arena where close reading calibrates computational exploration, and state-space models open new pathways for scholarly and public understanding of literature as dynamics in time.

Introduction: This is a strange way to assemble a working paper

Over the last 15 years or so I’ve written a bunch of working papers and posted them to the web. Most of them consist of expository prose from beginning to end and a number of them have a few of many diagrams of one kind or another. A few of them are argued as carefully as a formal academic paper, though perhaps not so dense with supporting apparatus. Most of them are not so formal; some are more like popular scientific writing, though not on standard scientific topics; others are even more relaxed. But coherent prose, all of them, sentences and paragraphs, some headings and subheadings. That’s it.

This working paper is different. It’s a transcript of a long conversation I had with ChatGPT that began with the functional organization of the human brain and ended up somewhere beyond those pesky Two Cultures than so many earnest academics like to rattle on about. In between I talk about something I call virtual reading, which involves literary texts, high-dimensional lexical spaces and computing. Then I toss in brain study. After that it gets complex. Here and there we have some longish passages of prose, but mostly it’s one or three sentences at a time strung between a passel of bulleted lists and a blither of headings and subheadings. Not prose.

Why would I inflect that on you. Two reasons: 1) if you think carefully about it, it turns out to be challenging and interesting and 2) I just don’t have time to turn it all into properly argued prose.

This working paper is based on a dialog I had with ChatGPT 5.2 on January 16, 17, and 18, 2026. Most of it is, in fact, an almost direct transcription of that dialog. Why would I Issue such a crude and unpolished text?

I note, first of all, that you do not have to read that transcript if you are curious about what’s in this document. I have provided both an abstract (288 words) and a summary (846 words), both created by ChatGPT. You don’t have to slog through that transcript if you are interested. If you want details, though, you’ll find them in the transcript.

Note, furthermore, that here and there throughout the dialog you’ll find islands of coherent prose. ChatGPT produced some of them without prompting from me; these tend to be single paragraphs. It generated others in response to prompts from me; these tend to be multi-paragraphed, and somewhat long. Look for them. Finally, look for the hyperlinks ChatGPT embedded in the text.

What’s the Fourth Arena?

You may be wondering about that “Fourth Arena” in the title. It also shows up in the text. Here it is: “Fourth Arena” is a term I am using to refer to an emerging domain beyond matter, life, and culture, made possible by the deep integration of humans with computational systems. As AI increasingly participates in cognition, memory, and coordination, new hybrid forms of agency arise that are neither purely human nor merely mechanical. In this sense, the Fourth Arena echoes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of a noosphere—a new layer of collective mind—but grounds it technologically and institutionally. Its defining shift is not greater efficiency, but a reorientation of human value away from work and toward play, meaning, and shared exploration.