(This is Part 6, the final part of my series on Zipf’s Law. For Part 5 see here.  I had not planned this conclusion to be so heavily delayed — exams intervened). My previous posts have argued for the usefulness of a certain parameter — a — gleaned from power-law fitting a text in determining the stylistic concerns of a text.  The question I want to address here is simple: where does this leave the phenomenal experience of reading?  To what degree do certain stylistic experiences (for example, recognizing something as a sample of Puritan plain style, or as “Stein-esque”) supervene on a word distribution deviant from a norm? Though my answer to this question is ambivalent, I believe this exercise has been useful in diagnosing the normal way critics approach texts. Generally, critics are taught to work backwards from the phenomenal experience of reading a text, tracing the effects the texts produce back to their sources in internal contradictions or the historical grounds of their production.  In a sense, this acts as a recapitulation of the Freudian dream form (perhaps delivered through the vector of Frederic Jameson’s use of Lacan to bolster his historical-symptomatic). By treating the ‘straightforward’ experience of a text as an epiphenomenon of some “lower level” causal factor, for example, the smoothing over of an ideological contradiction, we commit ourselves to a particular conception of the reading mind.  On this account, the phenomenological aspect of reading is not only produced from below — crucially we also tend to believe that given the right method (again, think of Marx) we can trace the provenance of this phenomenological experience back to its source. This idea of mind has come into question in recent practice. Surface reading, for example, argues that critics should focus mostly on the latent properties of […]