The paper addresses the manner in which literary criticism builds models. In the first part, actualization is revealed as the most basic operation of model building in literary studies. Actualization is necessary as literary phenomena are not just artefacts but have a specific field of potentiality which makes different interpretations possible. Actualization is accompanied by other operations such as generalizations and particularizations, and also on occasion by naturalization, depending on the goal of modelling. Every modelling being teleologically oriented, the goal, or what the model is a model for, is the deciding factor for what tools of actualization will be used and what will be transferred by the model. The tools of actualization can come from literature or from elsewhere. As such, they can belong to energy transition discourse, e.g. with regard to ecocriticism in an ecopoetic text. There is, however, a strategic model building that addresses literary potentiality as such, and it involves the combination of three operations different than the above mentioned. It requires that one adopts a starting theory; it supposes double or multiple actualizations and double or multiple interpretations; finally, it necessitates the use of elements of what is being analyzed—as tools of actualization in a self-referential way, enabling them to indicate, in a formal manner, the potentiality, and thus to reverse the direction of actualization.