Reading the Machine: Prompt Literacy as an Emerging Interpretive Competence in English Literary Studies

Abstract

The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into reading, writing, and research practices has produced a new communicative act—the prompt—and, alongside it, a new object of pedagogical concern that researchers have begun to call “prompt literacy”. This study examines prompt literacy as a rhetorical and interpretive competence within English literary studies. Using a textual-rhetorical approach, it analyses a purpose-built illustrative corpus of forty prompts representing AI-assisted literary reading, analytical writing, creative pastiche, comparison, and revision tasks. Existing scholarship on prompt literacy has emerged largely from educational technology, library and information science, and second-language education, and has tended to treat prompting as a generalisable technical-cum-critical skill applicable across disciplines. Comparatively little attention has been paid to what English literary studies, specifically, might contribute to or gain from this literacy, despite the discipline’s long history of training readers and writers in exactly the competencies—audience awareness, genre recognition, interpretive framing, iterative revision, and reflective self-awareness—that recent prompt-literacy frameworks identify as central (Lo, 2023). This article addresses that gap. Using a textual-rhetorical method adapted from literary and rhetorical criticism, the study analyses a purpose-built, illustrative corpus of forty prompts modelled on patterns documented in the literature on AI-assisted reading, writing, and literary analysis. Five recurring competencies are identified and mapped onto established concepts in reader-response theory, genre theory, and theories of authorship: audience positioning, genre calibration, interpretive framing, iterative revision, and metacognitive reflection. The findings suggest that prompt literacy, far from being an alien, purely technical competency, is continuous with the interpretive and rhetorical training English literary studies has long provided, and that the discipline is, therefore, well positioned—and arguably obligated—to take a leading role in its cultivation. The article closes with a discussion of the pedagogical, theoretical, and curricular implications of this continuity, along with limitations and directions for confirmatory empirical research.