Catholic Literature and Film: Incarnational Love and Suffering by Nancy Enright (review)

If employed skillfully, an academic seminar can be a splendid pedagogical tool. A lecture-based course has its place as well. It provides clear structure, especially for introductory courses, but it also allows a kind of intellectual passivity. Students take notes, ask questions, read assigned collateral texts, and put together certain fundamental concepts for more advanced work. At the end, students prepare for a test to demonstrate how accurately they have mastered "the material.'' It's not a very engaging process, but in most fields a necessary first step. Few professors of physics, for example, would want beginners to compose an essay or engage in a conversation about "My Perspectives on Quantum Mechanics.''

A seminar, by contrast, encourages contributions and personal reactions from each of the participants. Interdisciplinary seminars can be particularly profitable by bringing together perspectives and methodologies that engage a topic from different perspectives. To cite an obvious example, a seminar on environmental issues could realistically involve a chemist, an economist, a biologist, a sociologist, a political scientist, and several others. By sharing their expertise, the diverse contributors should enrich the topic for one another. At least that is the aspiration. But such a method also risks losing focus and leaving some participants bewildered at the amount of information coming at them from different directions, from unfamiliar sources and without enough context to follow the conversation.

The comparison, such as it is, neatly summarizes the aspiration and ultimate weakness of Nancy Enright's Catholic Literature and Film: Incarnational Love and Suffering. Enright is an associate professor at Seton Hall University, a Catholic university in South Orange, New Jersey. In her introduction, Enright acknowledges the connection between her classroom work and this collection of essays: "This book grew out of an English Literature/Catholic Studies class revolving around a selection of works of literature with Catholic themes made into film. The class discussions around these texts and films were interesting'' (4). A reader has no reason to doubt this assessment. The enthusiasm generated in this class no doubt led to the decision to rework the subject matter into a book. This same reader, however, does not have the advantage of having worked through the assigned texts with other students before engaging in the classroom discussions. In a well-prepared conversation, interpretations can be challenged and clarified, sources explained, and assumptions tested. Yes, the experience can be "interesting'' and even stimulating for participants of a seminar, but the solitary reader of a book needs something more like an old-fashioned lecture course to be able to follow the critical observations in this text. Unless one has read the texts and seen the films recently, many of the allusions would be simply lost.

After a brief introductory chapter, in which she introduces the terms "sacramental'' and "incarnational'' as characteristic of Catholic literature, Enright offers six free-standing essays, each dealing with a literary work that was at one time adapted for the screen. A diverse selection it is: Henry Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The list presents even more of a complex challenge to one's recollection, since several of these works appeared in different versions: the novel Brideshead, for example, was reworked into a television mini-series and then a film; the novel Les Miserables appeared as a film, then was staged as a musical and eventually was remade into a musical film; Quo Vadis appeared in several silent versions before it was remade for sound. Enright tries to address all these variations with appropriate cross references, but it's more than challenging for someone to follow the comparisons without having spent the previous week preparing for the class by reviewing the material to be discussed...