Senses of freedom: re-determining aesthetic criticism

Senses of Freedom explores Walter Pater’s provocative claim that poetry’s defining importance would be to “rearrange the details of modern life” in order to restore the “sense of freedom” lost to modern consciousness. Freedom, variously defined and contested, has long been a central concern to philosophical aesthetics, but few have made its problematics central to an applied criticism. The critical practice I explore asks how form, in a given instance, provides a “sense of freedom” by addressing anxieties of causal determinism, and foregrounding the cultural and linguistic materiality of a subjective perspective. After an introduction outlining and contextualizing a formalist aesthetic criticism drawn from Pater’s work, the dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I surveys aestheticism’s determinist vision (Chapter I) and defines the complex term personality (Chapter II) across Pater’s oeuvre. Aestheticism’s determinism anchors the authorial personality to a network of historically contingent cultural and linguistic determinants; while the personality in turn gives an epistemologically accessible human form to these defining “forces.” Part II exemplifies aesthetic criticism in stand-alone essays on the poetry of three modern authors: Charlotte Mew, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden. In Mew’s work I examine the structure of confinement and passionate renunciation in the form of the hushed tone broken by the “cri de coeur.” In Beckett, I consider the gnomic mode as resolving the problematized space, the “no-man’s land,” between objective and subjective artistic positions. In Auden, I explore how the “gratuitous” and “gratitude” align in his later work, the former an attempt to find artistic freedom within an adequate determinism, and the latter the resolution to recognize world and self in their radical necessity.

2026-01-31T00:00:00Z