Mia Wu (USA)

I completed my BA in English Language and Literature at Oxford, with my work focusing on the idea of method in literary criticism. My dissertation considered John Milton’s Paradise Lost via William Empson’s The Face of the Buddha. I argued that two aspects of Empson’s thinking in The Face of the Buddha supported a reassessment of critical approaches to Milton: his distaste for cant discourse (particularly religious cant, which he attributed to ‘neo-Christian critics’ in the service of furthering their own theological orthodoxies), and his proposed method of ‘argufying’, an approach to criticism which allows for the possibility that language and literature may only expose conflict, rather than resolving it.

 I am now studying for my MSc in Digital Scholarship and planning to extend my undergraduate work on Empson. He was a deeply interdisciplinary thinker – a mathematician as well as a literary critic – and I hope to explore his ideas of ambiguity through a technical lens. I believe that ambiguity can be oversimplified in digital spaces and want to consider practical ways in which we can challenge the flattening of language. In general, I am both excited by and somewhat wary of the possibilities of quantifying our approaches to humanistic work, and hope that the Ertegun will be a unique space to hold wider conversations around the relationship between technology (not least the buzzwords of artificial intelligence!) and the humanities.