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The
comic violence, bad language, exaggeration,
For the literary theorist and philosopher satire, and shape-shifting which fill this
Mikhail Bakhtin 1, the carnivalesque is both book are, for Bakhtin, the greatest example
the description of a historical phenomenon of carnivalesque literature. Ever concerned
and the name he gives to a certain literary with the liberation of the human spirit,
tendency. Historically speaking, Bakhtin Bakhtin claimed that carnivalesque literature
was interested in great carnivals of Medieval — like the carnivals themselves — broke
Europe. He saw them as occasions in which apart oppressive and moldy forms of thought
the political, legal and ideological authority and cleared the path for the imagination and
of both the church and state were inverted the never-ending project of emancipation.
— albeit temporarily — during the anarchic
and liberating period of the carnival. Bakhtin suggests that carnivalesque
literature also became less common as the
The carnival was not only liberating because increasingly privatized world of modern,
- for that short period - the church and state individualistic capitalism took hold.
had little or no control over the lives of the
revelers, although Terry Eagleton points out Instances of the Carnivalesque?
this would probably be “licensed”
transgression at best. But, its true liberating o Reality TV
potential can be seen in the fact that set rules o Spring Break
and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or o Girls Gone Wild
reconception at carnival time; it “cleared the o Homecoming
ground” for new ideas to enter into public o Costume parties
discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest o Saturday Night Live
that the European Renaissance itself was o Halloween
made possible by the spirit of free thinking o Super Bowl
and impiety that the carnivals engendered. o Mardi Gras
1
Russian linguist and literary critic, whose writings,
including Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929)
and The Dialogic Imagination (1975), were very
influential in 20th-century structuralism,
poststructuralism, social theory, and the theory of the
novel.