Simulated Social Action

Previous analyses of the rhetoric of literary criticism establish English studies as a disciplinary discourse community with both a characteristic rhetoric and a distinctive rhetorical approach to research activity, albeit one that is gradually changing over time. The findings of these prior studies allow me to examine LLM outputs to assess whether and how they simulate this disciplinary rhetoric. The comparison showcases differences and similarities between the rhetoric of literary criticism composed by human writers and the simulated literary-critical rhetoric that AI is capable of generating in 2025. This study shows that there remains a profound difference, although the superficial similarities between human- and LLM-composed literary criticism are striking. I will argue that while LLMs effectively signal the genre of the literary research article, they fail to register its rhetorical context or undertake its characteristic social action.