Más allá de las palabras: un estudio comparatista de la representación de la gracia, el pecado y la redención en la novela y la película Brideshead Revisited

Reconocido como uno de los grandes novelistas ingleses del siglo XX; artista criticado, admirado, odiado y envidiado a partes iguales. La trayectoria literaria de Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) es admirable. Autor versátil y polifacético, Waugh, cultivó con éxito varios géneros1, dando lugar a una obra rica y diversa, producto del pensamiento y el sentimiento de un escritor comprometido con las vicisitudes de su tiempo. Tras la II Guerra Mundial, el inglés percibe el colapso moral de la civilización europea y esto se hará sentir con claridad en sus obras, en donde la llaga social quedará muy vivamente retratada.

The Catholic Revival in English Literature

The article deals with research of the Catholic revival as a remarkable literary movement that amalgamated a number of authors who discussed problems of the Roman Catholicism in the works of various forms – from serious theological apologies to the popular genres like G.K. Chesterton's detective stories. Such Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene appeal to the wide readership and interpret the problem of faith in its complex ambivalence, actuality, psychological depth. Whilst Evelyn Waugh is in search for a solid ground in the Old Faith as an alternative to the modern anarchy and chaos, Graham Greene emphasizes on the faith's conflicting ambiguities and contradictions.

Satirical grotesque in the novel “Decline and Fall” by Evelyn Waugh

This research is conducted in the context of literary stylistics that is focused on the linguistic and expressive means of artistic depiction of the reality, and peculiarities of their used by a particular author. The novel “Decline and Fall” by the prominent English satirical writer Evelyn Waugh served as the materials for this research. “Decline and Fall” of England of the XX century is the cross-cutting theme of the entire creative path of E.Waugh, the stylistic dominant of which is the satirical grotesque. The aforementioned defined the goal of research – explication of the key mechanisms and means of creating a satirical grotesque in the novel, which exposes and ridicules the vices of English society in the 1920s, as well as criticizes imperfections of educational system in the privileged educational institutions of England of that time. The article reviews the problem of emergence of the term “grotesque”, underlines its correlation with aesthetic category of the comic, and indicates the role and place of this literary technique in the works of Evelyn Waugh. It is determined that using satirical grotesque, Waugh creates unique world, alternative to the real that misaligns with perceptions on realism, for the description of which he applies all available techniques. The research demonstrates that the key mechanisms that determine the grotesque beginning of the novel include a combination of the mutually exclusive, hyperbolization, reification of characters, etc. A special satirical expressiveness and tragicomism, reduced to absurdity, manifests on the different levels of the novel (lexical, onomastic, morphological, syntactic, graphic). From this perspective, the novel “Decline and Fall” is being examined for the first time, which defines the novelty of this work, and outlines future prospects of studies dedicates to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and satirical grotesque in particular.

Análisis comparativo de las estructuras articulatorias de los mundos posibles en las transducciones de "Brideshead Revisited" de Evelyn Waugh

Las obras de ficción poseen en su constitución artística estructuras que articulan el mundo posible que en ellas se desarrolla y las interacciones de los personajes entre sí y con el mundo en el que habitan. Estas estructuras articulatorias de los mundos posibles, mediante procesos miméticos, emulan patrones existentes en la realidad efectiva, haciendo que los mundos ficcionales sean verosímiles, reconocibles y significativos para el receptor. En este artículo nos detenemos a examinar las estructuras que responden a categorías éticas, estéticas y religiosas y analizamos la presencia o ausencia de estas en las transducciones intersemióticas televisiva y cinematográfica de la obra literaria Brideshead Revisited, de Evelyn Waugh y comprobamos de qué modo la estructura de orden general del protomundo se ve afectada en el proceso de transmodalización al respetar o prescindir de estas estructuras articulatorias.

Bad Formalism

This chapter examines a wide range of work by Evelyn Waugh—the novels Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved One (1948) and the stories “The Balance” (1926) and “Excursion in Reality” (1932)—in order to show how Waugh develops an overarching narrative aesthetic out of his relationship with film. Engaging with the epistemology of the camera eye and the complexities of film viewing, this broader film writing constantly oscillates between two poles of formal extremism, sometimes risking a mechanical, formulaic rigidity and at other times courting a dissolution into chaotic formlessness. Waugh's aesthetics can therefore be described as bad formalism: one side of this dialectic develops too much form, while the other establishes too little. Neither manages just the right amount of formal production to count as “good” modernist formal innovation. Taken together, these extreme forms attest to the extent to which Waugh's work consistently allegorizes the condition of the late modernist writer struggling to survive a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema, as Waugh's satires take the form of—or rather deform—the Künstlerroman, twisting its narrative into a different shape with a less than heroic end.

Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”