| El sueno de la Razon produce monstruos.;Faust dreams the Renaissance dream of reason. One day he wakes up only to discover himself surrounded by the monsters that his dream has spawned.;In our culture the Renaissance is posited as a positive value, associated with ascent and development, while the era preceding it is posited as a negative value. But we should perhaps not be too hasty to champion the one, while calumniating the other, for the former could also be seen in terms of descent and devolution. Perhaps what the Renaissance gained in letters, it lost in grace.;The subject of this thesis is Faust, brilliant scholar, accomplished doctor, paradigm of Renaissance man, as represented in three major dramatic works: Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Goethe's Faust and Valery's "Mon Faust". The Faust of these texts is a personage who follows his fetish, his cerebralness to its limit, or surfeit. But instead of finding nourishment, meaning or enrichment in his pursuits, he discovers a void, an impoverishment, or a hunger. It is important to remember that Faust (as a literary work) is a product of the Protestant imagination: and that an important directive of the Protestant project was to totally eradicate and annihilate Mariology. Thus "as above, so below." (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
