CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Denischenko, Irina Mickhaylovna |
|---|---|
| Title | Towards a Reconciliation of the Carnivalesque with Bakhtin's Christian Weltanschauung |
| Summary | The religious dimension of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin’s work currently remains under-explored in Western criticism, where the image of Bakhtin as a literary critic overshadows his contribution as a Christian thinker. In this thesis, I reinterpret some Christian motifs, such as kenotic Incarnation, in Bakhtin’s early as well as late works as foundations for some of his most important terminological innovations, such as the carnivalesque. Bakhtin’s latent religious discourse not only illustrates his familiarity with Orthodox theology, but also reveals his engagement in dialogue with some of the major religious philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia, among whom are Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev. Thus, one of the main aims of this thesis is to articulate a common intellectual paradigm loosely framed around the interpretation of Incarnation as kenosis. In this study, I mainly rely on the approaches of the Cambridge School for tracing the usage history of the term kenosis. An understanding of kenosis as a functional rather than substantive process, which can be applied to explain a variety of (substantively) different (but functionally similar) phenomena, grounds the celebration of matter one finds in the writings of both the fin de siècle Russian religious philosophers and Bakhtin. |
| Supervisor | Riedl, Matthias; Szonyi, Gyorgy |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/denischenko_irina.pdf |
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