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Renascence

Volume 72, Issue 1, Winter 2020

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Displaying: 1-4 of 4 documents


1. Renascence: Volume > 72 > Issue: 1
Steven Knepper

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In recent decades, the philosopher William Desmond (1951-) has offered both insightful readings of individual tragedies and a striking reformulation of old Aristotelian standbys like hamartia and catharsis. This reformulation grows out of his wider philosophy of the “between,” which stresses humans’ fundamental receptivity or “porosity.” For Desmond, tragedy strips away characters’ self-determination and returns them to porosity. The audience is returned to porosity as well, a process of exposure that can be harrowing, and at times leads to despair, but that can also lead, in Desmond’s take on catharsis, to a renewed sense of the worth of fragile beings. Both tragic “being at a loss” and catharsis are important for philosophy because they resist determinate conceptualization. Tragedy reminds philosophy of its limits, and it challenges philosophy to attend to the intimate and the singular. This essay situates, synthesizes, and extends Desmond’s many reflections on tragedy. It focuses in particular on Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear.

2. Renascence: Volume > 72 > Issue: 1
Christine Grogan

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Contributing to the uneasy question of race in Flannery O’Connor's fiction, this article performs a rereading of the last story she penned—“Parker’s Back”—and argues that her final protagonist may have been a product of miscegenation. It discusses the implications this would have on our understanding of this spiritually rich story, and, perhaps even more importantly, of O’Connor’s views on race at the end of her life.

3. Renascence: Volume > 72 > Issue: 1
Amber True

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Community is the framework for the Christian experience. The Greek text from which the English bible is translated uses the ἐκκλησια, which means “assembly,” “assemblage, gathering, meeting,” and in the earliest text, “the universal church to which all believers belong.” Thus, the very idea of Christianity after Christ suggests community. Robert Southwell trained to contribute to a very particular portion of the Christian community in Elizabethan England, but the lyric poetry he produced during this time represents community as flawed and as a potential hindrance to salvation. His poetry responds to the orthodoxy of community by representing real, lived community as spiritually counterproductive and juxtaposing it against the necessity of individual experience and salvation.

4. Renascence: Volume > 72 > Issue: 1

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