Bakhtin, Mikhail | Robert Anchor (essay date Spring 1985)
Robert Anchor (essay date Spring 1985)
[Anchor is an American historian and translator. In the following essay, he examines Bakhtin's interpretation of the carnival as a liberating experience in popular culture and shows the important role it plays in his theory of the novel.]
Mikhail M. Bakhtin is best known for his visionary conception of carnival—the carnivalesque, "carnival consciousness," "the culture of laughter"—as a model for the regeneration of time and the world and the emancipation of the human spirit: "This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" [Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky, 1968]. Bakhtin elaborated this model most fully in his best known work, Rabelais and His World, written largely in 1940, though not published until 1965, partly at least because of its...
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