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Displaying: 1-17 of 17 documents


1. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 4
Jeffrey Hipolito

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This essay offers an introduction to Owen Barfield’s long romance poem, Riders on Pegasus. It argues that the poem is a complex example of “romantic modernism,” self-consciously following in the tradition of Blake and Shelley while responding in an equally self-aware way to the anti-romantic modernism of early Eliot and Auden. It argues for the formal and aesthetic accomplishment and interest of the poem, and suggests that it is an as yet overlooked masterpiece of mid-century English poetry.

2. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 4
Jean Bocharova

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Although scholars have read “The Depressed Person” in relation to questions of the self and problems of communication and self-expression, this paper reads the story as an entry point for examining the religious dimensions of Wallace’s work. Comparing Wallace with G.K. Chesterton, the paper argues that if we can accept that the depressed person’s condition is not a biologically grounded clinical depression but an exaggerated personification of a common ailment—a particular brand of loneliness—then we can see that we each have a stake in the search for a way to break the dehumanizing pull of our own egos. Wallace and Chesterton point to submission and attention as potential means of escape, even if they disagree about how to do this. When confronted with the challenge of finding happiness, joy, and connection in a world that encourages introspection, explanatory mastery, and mechanistic views of the self—of finding meaning in the face of forces of meaninglessness, nihilism, and self-centeredness—both draw on imaginative literature as a source of knowledge. Wallace stops just short of orthodoxy, but his works stand as courageous defenses of the human person against the strange but dangerous foes of modern American life.

3. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 4
Elizabeth Burow-Flak

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Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant explore the role of memory in aftermath of genocide; both authors employ fantasy and the metaphor of the buried giant to represent past slaughters. Although distinct in genre, the novels together demonstrate the tension between forgiving and forgetting in memory studies following the atrocities of the twentieth century. Forgiveness in the Ender saga falls short of the accountability embedded in “difficult forgiveness” as defined by Paul Ricoeur, as does the imposed forgetfulness between previously warring parties in The Buried Giant. Similarly, the fictions demonstrate, on a corporate scale, neither “unconditional forgiveness” as defined by Jacques Derrida nor “unconditional love” as defined by Martha Nussbaum. On an interpersonal level, however, The Buried Giant demonstrates the transformative powers of all of these practices, thus inviting reflection on how they might effect larger-scale reconciliations.

4. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Teresa Hanckock-Parmer

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This article examines the discourse of enclosure utilized by Maria de San Jose (1656-1719, Puebla), Jeronima Nava y Saavedra (1669-1727, Bogota), and Francisca Josefa de Castillo (1671-1742, Tunja, Colombia) in their spiritual autobiographies. Despite dissimilar personal vocation narratives, these Hispanic nuns embraced enclosure as a tool of continuing spiritual advancement, both before and after actual profession of monastic vows. They portrayed the cloister simultaneously as connubial bedchamber and isolated hermitage, thus ascribing Baroque religious meaning to ancient anchoritic models through intersecting discourses of desert solitude, redemptive suffering, Eucharistic devotion, and nuptial mysticism. To attain ideal enclosure for self and others, these nuns advocated for reform in New World convents, which often reproduced worldly hierarchies, conflicts, and values. Enclosure, more than a symbolic vow or ecclesiastical mandate, constituted a formative practice that fostered correct action and attitude in nuns’ lives; these women conscientiously sought a cloistered life through which they cultivated holiness and created new spiritual meaning.

5. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Terry W. Thompson

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Charles Dickens, considered by many the poet laureate for the poor and downtrodden of his time, had a great fondness for "religious and moral themes." As a result, "one does not have to read very far in either the major or minor works of Dickens to learn lessons contained in both the New and Old Testaments." Among his favorite biblical allusions are examples of the many hard "lessons" visited upon the rich and the powerful by a just God. One of the author's most resonating Old Testament references is to the "great feast" of King Belshazzar, the sixth century B.C. ruler of Babylon who loved gold and silver more than people, more than life itself. Allusions, subtle and otherwise, to this self-destructive tyrant appear—with telling effect—in several of Dickens's best-known novels, from A Christmas Carol to A Tale of Two Cities.

6. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Ahmet Süner

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This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.

7. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3

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8. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2
Jeffrey Hipolito

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9. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2
Mark Zunac

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While criticism of Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has generally focused on the novel’s Catholic themes, it has often overlooked the author’s exploration of certain correlative artistic values that that are both sustained by the Christian vision and integral to the development of a humane and soul-enriching culture. That culture for Waugh was necessarily grown out of an identifiable past and evoked by artistic representations of divine grace and human potential. This essay argues that Charles Ryder’s eventual Catholic conversion remains indispensable to the novel’s fulfillment of its author’s vision. This critical denouement, however, also serves to affirm the grace that is revealed throughout by the protagonist’s instinctive veneration for traditions besieged by a soulless and secular modernism. In this way, worldly beauty is intricately entwined with a life of virtue and can thus be seen as adjacent to those values hitherto singularly ascribed by critics of Brideshead to the Catholic mission.

10. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2
Mary A. Melfi

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In A Passage to India, E.M. Forster examines the duality of three main characters, Mrs. Moore, Aziz, and Fielding and thereby demonstrates their relative stability in the primordial chaos of India. Unlike Adela who falls apart after her experience in the cave, these characters draw on the power of the imagination in a grappling struggle to remain morally centered when facing the darkness within. Forster suggests that turning to the East (where the Marabar caves represent darkness and destabilization) contrasts with returning to the West (where imaginative form represents order and light). In Mrs. Moore, Aziz, and Fielding, Forster examines the manner in which one might embrace a centered life committed to empathy for others by way of facing one’s own otherness. As these characters immerse themselves in India’s primordial formlessness and acknowledge their shadows, they embrace imaginative form rather than fall apart, and in doing so they serve as models of mythmakers and relative stability.

11. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2
David N. Beauregard

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The basic argument of the essay is that in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare represents Aristotelian-Thomistic notions of love and friendship. In the attraction of Bassanio for Portia we have the three-fold analysis of love as desire for the useful, the pleasurable and the virtuous. In the male friendship between Antonio and Bassanio we see the liberal man’s virtuous desire to give and share his wealth with his friends. Both relationships are concerned with giving and taking, a reflection of the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between love as desire and love as friendship. A final note is the play’s conclusion in the Aristotelian goods of happiness, gratuitous good fortune with the safe arrival of Antonio’s ships, union in friendship and marriage with Portia and Bassanio, Nerissa and Gaziano, and the wonder and delight that is to follow with Portia’s answer to all remaining questions.

12. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2

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13. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 1
Maurizio Ascari

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A complex and controversial novel, Atonement is at the core of a lively critical debate, opposing those who focus on the impossibility of Briony’s atonement – also in relation to the author’s atheist views – to those who conversely explore the redemptive quality of her “postlapsarian” painful self-fashioning. Far from concerning simply the destiny of a literary character, this debate has to do with the impact Postmodernist relativism has on both the conception of the human subject and the discourses of the past, from memory to history and fiction. Discarding any potentially nihilistic interpretations of Atonement as disempowering, this article delves into Ian McEwan’s multi-layered text in order to comprehend its ambivalences, its subtle investigation of the human condition, and its status as a postmemory novel reconnecting us to the events of World War Two.

14. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 1
Michael Boler

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In the Ars Amatoria Ovid claims to make his audience experts in love; in the Remedia Amoris he teaches them how to fall out of love. These two poems are masterpieces of satirical comedy. At first glance Ovidian satire seems worlds apart from The Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis. While written for entirely different aims and differing in many obvious aspects, both works describe the surest means by which to suffocate love. For Ovid, it is romantic love that must be extinguished; for Screwtape, it is the love of God. While it might seem that the irony of The Screwtape Letters is distinctively modern, Lewis’s special form of irony finds its ancient precedent and model in the master of mock-didacticism, Ovid. Not only can the influence of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris be seen in the broad themes contained in The Screwtape Letters, but many of Screwtape’s specific avenues of attack were recommended by Ovid centuries ago.

15. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 1
W. Brett Wiley

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George Saunders, in “The 400-Pound CEO,” displays a theme that appears in many of his stories and that he has talked about in numerous interviews. Jeffrey, the protagonist and narrator of the story, confronts the dissonance that exists between enacting goodness and theological or ideological belief. The story ultimately suggests a Buddhist approach, what Saunders explains as a practical means of “react[ing] accordingly” to life as “that-which-is.”

16. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 1
Josh Pittman

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The narrator of the Middle English Cleanness states that God punishes sexual sin more harshly than any other sin. This essay argues that the rest of the BL Cotton Nero A.x manuscript continues to develop the virtue of temperance, which governs sexual behavior, as a central theme. Pearl uses temperance to bring home the dreamer’s sin and God’s justice, while Patience and SGGK employ the interrelation between temperance and fortitude in ways that make temperance foundational. Interrogating the interdependence of the virtues allows the poet to challenge the traditional hierarchy of virtues, in which temperance is the lowest, thus making the case that temperance is paradoxically foundational to other virtues, like justice and fortitude. In this way, the poems not only make a case for the value of temperance, but they also expose ambiguities in orthodox accounts of the virtues.

17. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 1

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