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This seminar will compare Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and its cinematic adaptation in the 1981 BBC television series with the same title. Both works recount some twenty years in the life of the gifted, central character and narrator Charles Ryder. The narrative moves from his years at Oxford to his romantic relationships first with the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte and then with Sebastian's beautiful sister Julia. It concludes with his maturation as an artist and finally his wrenching breakup with Julia. The seminar will begin with an analysis of the novel, attending particularly to Waugh's combination of a coming-of-age narrative, a romantic love story, and a country-house narrative. Discussion of the film will center on select scenes highlighted in the previous analysis of the novel. Focus will fall on the ways that distinctive cinematic features—such as casting, camera work, the mise en scene, and music—deepen and enrich the narrative's preoccupations with love and coming of age during a period of profound cultural, economic, and political change. Analyzed in this context, the film can be seen as a penetrating interpretation of the novel, one that enriches its prose narrative. It is not an alteration of the literal substance; the film brings to the surface significances already embedded in the text of the novel. Reading the novel and its cinematic adaptation comparatively from these perspectives reveals Waugh as an inspired craftsman and a lyrical writer of feeling and insight. It's little wonder that the novel and its adaptation have enjoyed popular as well as academic acclaim for nearly a half-century or that at the present time negotiations are afoot to produce yet another film adaptation.
