Narrative strategies in the gospel according to Luke : a Bakhtinian exploration

• Main Author: Fischer, Bettina Irene
• Other Authors: Whitaker, Richard
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2014
• Subjects: Classical Language and Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7431

Includes bibliographical references (leaves [215]-233). === Using the theory of the twentieth century Russian literary scholar and linguist, Mikhail Bakhtin, this thesis has set out to explore narrative strategy in the Gospel of Luke, the aim being to consider how this would affect a generic reading, and what implications this would have in assessing the discourse of this text. Bakhtin classifies early Christian writings as part of the Menippea, a collective name for a body of parodying-travestying literature ofthe Graeco-Roman period. In contrast to the classical genres of the mainstream, epic, love-poetry and tragedy, Bakhtin rates Menippean texts as being essentially dialogic, engaged in exploring ideas of life and death from the perspective of a carnivalistic view ofthe world. He uses the genre of the Greek Romance, seen by him as a forerunner of the European novel, to demonstrate some of his theory. Having selected the Romance, Chaereas and Callirhoe, by Chariton, as a comparative text to the Gospel of Luke, both texts are explored in terms of the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope, carnival, and intertextuality.