As a scholar of literature, I often feel embarrassed by linguistic regularities. While the consistencies of language are the very thing that allow critical thought on literature to exist (in that they allow the critic to be assured that her readers will share at least some of the phenomenal experience of reading a given text) academic scholars are more likely to focus on the idiosyncratic moments of a work rather than its ‘low level’ entropy-thwarting communicative structure. These moments of aberration more readily stick in the reader’s craw, demanding an explanation for their presence among the more pedestrian-seeming connectives and conjunctions that make up the ‘glue’ of written text.  However, with the rise of techniques like topic modelling, the regularities of language are becoming a major focus of critical attention. This focus is not entirely novel. Texts from the critical canon of narratology, for instance, often focus on the regular as a matter of due course.   The paradigmatic example must be Roland Barthes’ classic study S/Z. In his minute analysis of the structure of Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, Barthes does not hesitate to direct his gaze to Balzac’s use of what Barthes calls the ‘action’ code — a voice that “[implies] a logic in human behavior.” 1  These actions structure the text in a way that offers a baseline regularity for the reader to grasp.  Yet even this attempt to grasp the quotidian aspects of a text remains too high level.  Barthes’ focus remains solidly on the level of narrative — a coarser grain than the verbs and connectives that produce the action seme itself. But where will we find any finer grain? As he often does, eminent Modernist scholar and avid Heathkit computer enthusiast Hugh Kenner provides us with a way forward.  Kenner had a magpie mind, and […]