Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America by Lee Quinby

ISBN: 9781555531089

Northeastern University Press | 1991

Hardcover | 192 pages

Drawing on Michel Foucault's theories of power, this study examines issues of American individuality, ethics and freedom. Through detailed critical readings of a wide range of important American texts, the author identifies an “aesthetics of liberty”, an ethical tradition that presents the creation of self as an exercise of personal freedom and civic responsibility. She argues that this tradition of ethics has been and continues to be the chief means by which Americans challenge dominant modes of disciplinary power. Subsequent chapters on works by Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, James Agee, Walker Evans, Maxine Hong Kingston and June Jordan demonstrate that an ethical aesthetics of liberty has, over the last two centuries, been the discourse of intellectuals who have continued Jefferson's resistance to dominant notions of freedom, self-hood, beauty, and ethical conduct for Americans.