Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading (Rethinking Theory) - Softcover

LaCocque, Andre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810124599 ISBN 13: 9780810124592

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading, distinguished scriptural scholar André LaCocque deploys the analytical frameworks of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to analyze the book of Esther. Readers and scholars often question the inclusion of the book of Esther in the canon. The book’s flagrant displays of hatred, deceit, violence, and the anecdotal grotesqueries of Purim seem at odds with many biblical traditions. Such confusion, LaCocque reveals, arises from a wrong appraisal of Esther’s literary genre.

LaCocque finds in the book’s grotesque elements—from royal banquets that last a half-year to an improbable succession of coincidences and reversals of fortunes neutralizing a planned genocide—a natural fit with Bakhtin’s description of the “carnivalesque.”

Using key Bakhtinian tools such as the dialogic, the novelistic, the chronotopic, the polyphonic, and authoring-as-creating, LaCocque rereads Esther to show how the book’s comedic mood is paradoxically proportional to the catastrophic predicament of the Jews. Here, as biblical theocentrism shifts to Judeocentrism, we see how the carnivalesque becomes subversive of the Establishment and liberating. In Esther, the underlying conviction is that Jewish survival is providential—and that antisemitism is anti-God. This is, as LaCocque tells us with a nod to Aristotle, a worthy lesson disguised as a "low genre."

About this title

About the Author

André LaCocque is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and the founding Director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Studies at CTS. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Ruth: A Continental Commentary (Augsburg Fortress), Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading (Northwestern University Press), and the trilogy on innocence in the Hebrew Bible, The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve and the Yahwist (Wipf and Stock), Onslaught Against Innocence: Cain, Abel and the Yahwist, and The Captivity of Innocence: Babel and the Yahwist (both from Cascade). He also coauthored Thinking Biblically:Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies with Paul Ricoeur.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810124599
• ISBN 13: 9780810124592
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216