Children of the Fire: Art and the Quest for Freedom

Abstract

This dissertation asks one of the oft-asked questions of modernity, “Can art help us to become more free?”, and answers it in the affirmative, contending that art is not only a means, but the best means of inviting and steering human beings into possession of that inward liberty on which, as Milton rightly maintained, any stable outward liberty must depend. Steering clear of promulgating any aesthetic laws, the dissertation proposes a fourfold model of aesthetic experience that draws out in varied manner the striking tendency of the beautiful created forms we call art to foster and promote human freedom. Literary analysis produces aesthetic theory as the writings of John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Ellison are sifted in order to articulate a series of distinct but interrelated liberatory functions of art.