Brian Chappell

"The Ultimate Threshold Dialogue": Toward an Overview of Bakhtin's Philosophy of Christianity Brian Chappell

This thesis conducted under the tutelage of Professor Ricardo Ortiz at Georgetown University explores the early work of M. M. Bakhtin, emphasizing the influence of his Christian faith on the ideas that would later comprise dialogism. The ethical relationship between author and hero, and hero and the world, informs the freedom-preserving embodiment of an internally persuasive discourse that defies authoritative discourse. For Bakhtin Christ epitomizes that embodiment, and an analysis of two Russian works in which Christ appears as a character - Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita - illustrates this idea.