Meredith Free is graduating from Gordon College in May 2020 with a degree in Art and the History of Ideas in Fine Arts. Working in various mediums, including watercolor, oil, and acrylic paint, graphite, and charcoal, as well as stone, wood, assemblage sculpture, and now words, Meredith explores themes of paradox, ambiguity, and incomprehensibility captured in human experience. Her work has been displayed in New York City, Washington D.C., Beverly MA, Columbus OH, and Orvieto Italy, and can be seen at https://www.meredithfree.com/
Abstract: Aesthetic transport, the theory in aesthetic studies that art moves a person into a different sphere of understanding, a different mode of perception, has taken many forms over the years. Comparing various perspectives of aesthetic transport by Clive Bell and Crispin Sartwell against the poetic work of T.S. Eliot, this paper investigates the difference between the theoretical ideas of transport and the living artistic element of transport captured in Eliot’s work. While Clive Bell’s aesthetic theory declares that aesthetic transport is concerned with a world disassociated with ours, and Crispin Sartwell claims conversely that aesthetic transport is fully integrated with our embodied experience of the world, T.S. Eliot utilizes motifs of time, ancestry, and death in his poetry to create an experience of aesthetic transport which makes the intangible incarnate.