New Critical Nostalgia by Christopher Rovee;

Author:Christopher Rovee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

5. The Emergence of Josephine Miles (Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California)

The people born right this minute are probably going to go back and search the past in new ways.

—Josephine Miles, interview, August 25, 1977

The scholar and poet Josephine Miles was many things that interest readers today: an inventive visualizer of literary information, a trailblazing data miner, an interdisciplinary adventurer, a postcritical thinker who forged a career in the midst of a critical boom.1 Miles was what Silicon Valley types would call a “disrupter,” whose computational studies of poetic language challenged professional conventions in the moment of their consolidation. Her unusual work tested the boundaries of a congealing discipline—tested even the typesetters tasked with printing her intricate handwritten numerical tables.2 If it is tempting to think of Miles, with her prescient methods and interests, as a scholar ahead of her time, to the extent that she appears as an outlier to her era, born too soon, it is in part because the stories that get told about the rise of modern literary study tend to exclude women as well as (in a way that is systematically related) the methodological eclecticism that her work represented. Hers was an era of innovation, and she was one of its central figures, working consistently near the beating heart of her profession.

None other than William K. Wimsatt placed Miles in the middle of things. Never one to give praise lightly, Wimsatt wrote fulsomely of her significance within the field of English at mid-century, calling her work “a striking instance of a newly emergent historicocritical idiom.” His review of Eras and Modes of English Poetry (1957) is so unusually perceptive that it is worth quoting at length:

She is out precisely to make generalizations, to formulate viable historical concepts. Then in the second place, the technique has the interest and the merit of aiming neither simply at a contentual description (poems about melancholy, about death, about childhood, about outdoor nature, about love, are not her theme) nor simply at a formal description (unity, coherence, emphasis, prose, metrics, metaphor, simile—these are not her theme either). Rather her method of verbal statistics, richly informed or supplemented by her own special insights, is a union of the formal and the contentual which at its best comes close to being a masterly union for generalizations about poetic history.3

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