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101. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
Dr. Mark Bosco, S.J.

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102. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 4
Annette Oxindine

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While many recent readings of The Heat of the Day (1948) address Bowen’s indeterminate and unsettling prose style as a mirror or even an enactment of the destructive, nullifying forces at work in Blitz-weary London, this article posits that those same stylistic elements as well as the novel’s depictions of unstable subjectivities work against nullity to create complexly rendered regenerations, including two surreally conceived pregnancies. This article also suggests that the tensions often noted in Bowen’s negotiations between fictional realism and what critics have classified as the hallucinatory or surreal can be better understood by exploring Bowen’s spiritual beliefs, which she elucidates in numerous nonfiction pieces. The provocative liminality of the material and the spiritual in The Heat of the Day offers a compelling critical space from which to further explore Bowen’s prolific hybrid creations and the ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical mysteries they engender.

103. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 4
Christina Bieber Lake

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In the novel Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers’ protagonist—a fictional Richard Powers—succeeds in creating artificial life that would seem to be the epitome of the posthuman. As N. Katherine Hayles defines it, we became posthuman by our assent to the definition of life as consisting primarily in information patterns, not embodiment. Powers brings to life “Helen,” a machine made for a unique Turing test: to see if it could perform on a Master’s examination in English literature in a way indistinguishable from a typical graduate student. Through new developments in neuroscience, this paper argues that Powers reframes the posthuman and the so-called Science Wars by writing speculative fiction that neither condemns technology nor valorizes it. Instead, he argues that what we should fear is not the development of artificial intelligence, but the failure of people to exercise their capacities for ethical responsibility to others. By making a machine who is more sensitive to others and to our need for right action than the people around it are, Powers fights for the traditional goals of the liberal arts.

104. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 4
Emily R. Brower

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In The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene’s metafictional commentary (indicated by the relentless presence of language and literature in the content of the novel) runs parallel to his commentary on the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. Strikingly, written language, due to its own physical reality and the way in which it is treated in the novel, takes on sacramental characteristics. Both written language and the Eucharist are physical, and both make truth present. Through his use of physical texts to indicate the true nature of each character and by aligning the written word with the Eucharist, Greene offers a complex exploration of the sacramental possibilities of literature and language, ultimately contending that language itself is sacramental.

105. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 4
Brett Beasley

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While Oscar Wilde's plays and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, enjoy great attention and popularity among scholars and the general public alike, his final work, the 654-line poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, remains under-appreciated, particularly as far as critics are concerned. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as “a manipulative emotional diatribe” in which Wilde “draws a singleminded, heavy-handed, linear sentimentality into every stanza.” While I acknowledge the ways in which the poem's humility of style and subject matter are uncharacteristic for Wilde, I reject the notion that Reading Gaol is simple, either in aesthetic or moral terms. Focusing on the poem's images of "filth," I show that Wilde's swan song is in fact a work of great power and subtlety that demands that we rethink key assumptions about Wilde and about the literary imagination itself.

106. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 4

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107. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Jamie Callison

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108. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Heidi Hartwig

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Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a modernist conversion narrative that exposes cultural tensions around the post-War era’s preponderance of Catholic conversions. Like narratives written to vindicate the conversions precipitated by the Oxford Movement in the previous century, The End of the Affair explains how characters come to a certain belief that is largely derided by the prevailing culture. In contrast to the rational deliberation of these earlier models, conversion to Catholicism in this novel is distinguished by its irrationality, through a structure of over-determination, a rhetoric of imitation, metaphors of touch and contagion, and suggestions of supernatural intervention. Attending to the thematic of conversion highlights elements of the novel obscured by reading it as either a secularist novel or a moral theological novel — namely, elements that are particular to the hermeneutics of conversion narratives in depicting a character’s dynamic evolution from one set of beliefs to another.

109. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Jean Ward

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This article focuses on the Marian inspirations in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in Part IV of “The Dry Salvages”, which differs importantly from the fourth part of all the other Quartets in that it is worded as a prayer rather than a reflection or meditation, and still more interestingly, is addressed directly and unequivocally to the Virgin Mary. The discussion reveals how Eliot's recourse to Marian elements and prayers unsettles the comfortable middle-of-the-road Anglicanism of which the Four Quartets have been accused. This, however, is done not by calling on the high intellectual resources of Catholic theology and philosophy but by foregrounding that aspect of ordinary Catholic devotion that was for centuries foremost in Catholic-Protestant debate, and so perhaps giving voice to a yearning for something long absent from the mainstream of religious expression in English.

110. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Henry Mead

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This paper focuses on the doctrine of Original Sin, perhaps the most problematic of theological principles for radical writers seeking forms of liberation and progression. Stephen Mulhall has noted the doctrine seems to underpin even the most radically atheistic of modern thought, including that of Nietzsche. Proceeding on this logic, this paper looks at the contrasting attitudes to fallenness expressed by the Edwardian theologian F.R. Tennant, and the modernist writer T.E. Hulme, contrasting the liberal and conservative stances of theological and cultural ‘modernism’ respectively. It examines how these writers’ ideas responded to the debate between science and religion, ideas of vitalism, crowd psychology, and political populism, and ends by noting how the motif of the Fall occurs across a range of modernist texts by writers of various or no religious faith, reflecting the wider resonance of the idea in Western culture.

111. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Laura McCormick Kilbride

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What kind of language might reach and shape readers for revolution — where ‘revolution’ is revealed in the divine humanity of Christ? This essay considers this question as it was pursued in the journal of the Catholic Left, Slant, between 1960 and 1970. Considering how far the attempt to think a specifically catholic poetics might depart from contemporary radical English thinking, specifically the New Left, I begin by exploring the ways in which key words, such as language, liturgy and literature, are transformed when they enter the Catholic debate. I go on to explore these concerns by considering two poems from 1967-8. Throughout, I am concerned with the question of how far the cultural programme of Slant might be said to have a poetics, a question which prompts us to consider our ambitions for how we read and write today.

112. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 3
Paul Robichaud

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The early twentieth century saw the rise of various movements and communities in response to a perceived crisis in a western modernity that many contemporaries viewed as decadent and in urgent need of social, cultural, and spiritual renewal. In Britain in particular, several groups of traditional artisans expressed their rejection of modernity by leaving the city to form small artistic communities. Such community experiments often had their roots in the nineteeth-century Arts and Crafts movement, a background shared by the founding members of the community at Ditchling in Sussex — Eric Gill, Douglas (Hilary) Pepler, and Edward Johnston — but augmented by an increasing commitment to Roman Catholicism on the part of Gill and Pepler. The Ditchling group’s commitments to traditional handicrafts and the Church made their relationship to modernism tentative and difficult, but some members at least were familiar with artistic developments in the wider world. In particular, Eric Gill would reject modernism at Ditchling, while David Jones would embrace it to assert his artistic and spiritual independence.

113. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 2
Maurice Hunt

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Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale in describing the annual year names only three seasons—Spring, Summer, and Winter. This tripartite scheme is not unprecedented in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, e.g. Sonnet 5.5-6; Sonnet 6.1-2, 2 Henry 6 2.4. 1-3; The Tempest 4.1.114-15. What is unique to The Winter’s Tale involves Shakespeare’s correlation of three seasons to a tripartite division of humankind’s age, with a stress on the climacteric years when one season passes to the next. An assumption and a fact undergird this scheme: that a lifetime is 70 years (Psalm 90, verse 10), and that 23 is an important recurring number in this play. Humankind passes from Spring to Summer at age 23 and from Summer to Winter at age 46. Given the possible calculation of major characters’ ages in The Winter’s Tale, one discovers that Leontes after a sixteen-year gap of time is 44, while—in 1610 (the likely date of the play)—Shakespeare himself is 46. This correspondence is richly evocative of figurative final harvests.

114. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 2
Carla A. Arnell

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In the history of comparative scholarship on Dickens and Dostoevsky, many scholars have discussed comedy as a key point of affiliation between the two novelists. One scholar in particular has argued that both novelists portray comic buffoonery as a form of psychological escape from reality. Contrary to that idea, in two subplots with surprising parallels in Great Expectations and The Brothers Karamazov, Dickens and Dostoevsky represent comic play—tomfoolery—as a deliberately chosen way of confronting an absurd reality to bring health or healing. Ultimately, as a “love beyond logic” drives the characters in these stories to serve others through the power of comic play, they themselves become like little children, echoing each novel’s larger theme that growing older and wiser means becoming capable of the laughter of a little child.

115. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 2
William B. Ness

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The essay investigates O’Connor’s uses of motion and stasis throughout her canon with an emphasis on the early works. It examines O’Connor’s repeated use of the motifs of haste as spiritually destructive behavior and stasis as the necessary preliminary for redemptive grace moments in many of her stories and both of her novels. Two seminal O’Connor works, The Violent Bear It Away and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” are singled out for close thematic analysis that yields substantial support for a reading of these works as featuring incidents where a protagonist is suddenly slowed down and brought to a God encounter that offers spiritual transformation. Biographical insights gleaned from O’Connor’s collected letters in The Habit of Being add further credence to this interpretation and suggest autobiographical parallels with the fictional themes under discussion.

116. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 2
Lyle Enright

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Entering into conversation with the theological work of Michael Patrick Murphy and Hans Urs von Balthasar, this essay articulates a starting-point for reading Shusaku Endo’s Silence and exploring its relevance for contemporary discussions between Christian aesthetics and postmodernism. Under particular examination are the ways in which both Endo and Balthasar bring postmodern hermeneutics into conversation with Christian eschatology to address questions of knowledge and identity, examining not only how themes of resurrection appear aesthetically in the novel, but also how reading the novel from within this thematic framework speaks to its central concerns. Thus, this essay articulates an anticipatory or eschatological hermeneutic which hopes to do justice to both the violence of Endo’s story and the hope of the Christian narrative.

117. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 2

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118. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 1
Kevin R. West

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Critical assessment of the Arthurian court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has ranged from censure to exculpation, with the court’s origins, Arthur’s character, Gawain’s confession, and the court’s laughter variously taken to have great hermeneutical importance. I propose that Gawain’s transformation of the green girdle into a sign of shame, and the court’s reversal of that signification through adoption, compares well with Julian of Norwich’s heavenly vision of “tokyns of synne turnyd to worshyppe.” Approaching the poem by means of Julian’s contemporary, optimistic theology reveals the romance also to be optimistic, a story more of felix culpa than culpa mea.

119. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 1
Larry E. Fink

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This article begins with a review of Percy’s published statements about Hopkins’s influence on his fiction, particularly on his use of nature imagery. It appreciates Joseph Bizup’s 1994 article on Percy’s Love in the Ruins and James Wimsatt’s 2006 book, Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech and Sound. Next, it compares Hopkins’s & Percy’s use of sound devices and argues for reading Percy’s prose aloud for a full appreciation of his art. In addition to their sacramental view of nature, some of Hopkins’s personas and Binx Bolling share an ecstatic appreciation for the beauty and intricacy of creation. In preparation for the concluding observations about Binx’s search, his religious state at the beginning of the novel is summarized. The article closes with an analysis of how Percy uses distinctive diction and imagery from several of Hopkins’s best-known poems to suggest the role of the Holy Spirit in Binx’s spiritual journey.

120. Renascence: Volume > 69 > Issue: 1
Joshua Avery

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This essay argues that heretofore overlooked opening dialogue in All’s Well That Ends Well suggests clues as to the formation of a philosophical vision in Helena that is important to her disposition for the rest of the play. More specifically, references to Catholic-Protestant divisions frame epistemological questions that Helena ultimately resolves in a sacramental direction. I contend that this developed sacramental outlook allows her to make the leap of faith requisite for her successes. In the above respect, I claim that the play, its ambiguous ending notwithstanding, concludes in a genuinely comic vein.