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Renascence

Volume 71, Issue 2, Spring 2019

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

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2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 2

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