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Let's given them all a stern talking to.

AM radio. Never a cassette.

Probably a secretary position.

Kill the homeless?

The article takes for granted the settledness of poststructualist theory and a cultural-studies research agenda.

It takes for granted that reading can be transformative, can enhance the lives of the reader. Reading is quite literally bypassed here. Is this really a cause for optimism?

2. LLMs can reconstruct cultural milieu and subgroups that didn't have the privilege of writing novels, e.g. Asian Americans before 1940 (220).

Why should *literary scholars* turn their noses down at novels? Sociology is a thriving. It makes more sense to do this work in the social sciences.

This can only persuade a particularly doctrinaire, shallow poststructuralist.

(a) Should it not instead alert us to the many criticisms of poststructualism? What's so great about intentionlessness?

(b) Since when have poststructualists looked for empirical vindications?

1. They claim LLMs confirm poststructualist theories of language:

"LLMs' decentering of intention, the author, and referent [provides] early empirical vindication of the now esential thories of writing at the core of many disciplines [and should] be cause for joy" (219).

It's odd how so much of this criticism manages to wave away ethical thought (ethics = bad politics), and also come off as extremely moralizing. Even now, literary studies where MacIntyre said academic philosophy was in the '80s: inarticulate, inhabiting a vocabulary we don't understand.