Yet as children of the enlightenment and as beneficiaries of Darwin and Freud, humanists have to be open to the claims of the rationalist and to resist the defensive posture. The kind of structures that he proposes seem recognizable but operate at a lower level of organization than the structures of texts. Simon perhaps would not agree, but it seems to me that what he is describing is the micro level of processing, and what literary criticism tries to describe is the macro level. But Simon's analysis offers only a picture of the lowest level of functioning. Since it is the patterning that counts, the flatness of the arousal model does not offer us a helpful enough tool for looking at the creation of meaning.
Literary criticism starts from the other end of the scale.
It describes the macro structures using a rich variety of representations from the rhetorical to the cultural. In short at the critical level there is a tremendous richness of available patterns but no shared notion of how these patterns are part of minds rather than texts. This brings us to the question of usefulness. It seems to me that the most promising part of the cognitive model is its invitation to literary critics to think in terms of process rather than product. The great promise of building a persuasive cognitive model at the micro level is that it can perhaps serve as a model of how the larger patterns of cultural and formal elements come together and are changed by the artist or by the work of art.