(This is part 5 of my series on Zipf’s Law. For part 4 see here) Stein and Experimentalism In my last post, I promised to offer evidence that my technique employed thus far is non-vacuous, that it can account for variety across different texts. To test this theory, one could do much worse than leap 200 years hence from Puritan shores to the cosmopolitan work of Gertrude Stein. The combination of Stein’s American origins and European residence produced one of modernism’s more distinct aesthetics, especially in the case of Stein’s “middle” experimental works like The Making of Americans, A Novel of Thank You, and Lucy Church Amiably. Characterized by iteration, permutation, and unresolved referentiality, these works form a sort of allusive stew that challenges reading practices that ascribe overly deep meaning to the texts while still offering some sort of meaning-carved handhold onto which the critical reader can cling. Stein’s usage of this style has been (unsurprisingly) contextualized a myriad of ways. Two particular efforts stick out as useful to our agenda. The first comes from critic Carolynn Van Dyke who in her article “Bits of Information and Tender Feeling” argues that Stein’s work presages the techniques computer generated literature. Comparing Lucy Church to the work man-machine collaborative text generator Racter, Van Dyke pronounces both samples examples of “schizophrenic” texts that consist of “fragmentary and deformed syntax,” “erratic allusions” and the “violation of discursive norms of relevance and informativeness.” 1 A striking statement, given that Cancho’s framework provides expected values for the written work of schizophrenics. Processing a corpus primarily composed of Stein’s middle period experimental works reveals strikingly low values: 2 Almost all of the works dip well below the common value of ~2. As noted above this same phenomenon does not occur in the writings of similarly experimental […]