Bakhtin carnival and the grotesque body

The political elite in inter-war France sought innovative ways to reconcile modernization agendas with existing regional cultural traditions. Regional folkloric traditions and ludic festivals provided refuge from maligned national narratives. Burgundians, notably, drew upon carnival practices and motifs to solicit broad participation in a state-sanctioned project of regional modernization. Although organized by ostensibly opposed political, social, commercial, and cultural interests, Dijon’s Mère-Folle carnival and subsequent carnaval parades accomplished the same goals. These included creating a new spirit of civic pride and unity along, providing a time and space for overlapping and converging transformations to coexist and stabilize traditional cultural practices while limiting possibilities for women’s émancipation.

Mikhail Bakhtin and the group of thinkers known as the Bakhtin Circle have had a massive influence on contemporary literary and cultural theory. Bakhtin is recognised as perhaps the key theorist on the novel as a genre, and his writings on carnival in popular culture are a recurrent theme in cultural studies. The influence of the Circle has recently spread into social theory, philosophy and psychology, which means that a narrow literary approach is now inadequate for fully understanding the breadth of their ideas. Moreover, recent research has revolutionised our understanding of the work of the Bakhtin Circle and retranslation has shown that many of the existing translations are significantly flawed. It is also now clear that the work of the Circle was the product of discussions between members of an extraordinary group of scholars.

This is the first book to bring together this significant new research on the Circle, setting it within a historical and intellectual context and emphasising the importance of the work of the Circle as a whole. Craig Brandist offers a new look at the significance of Bakhtin's legacy, and brings into clearer focus the contribution of others in the circle--including Voloshinov, Medvedev, Pumpianskii and Kagan--whose work has so often been obscured, assessing the fundamental role they played in shaping Bakhtinian thought.

he life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail' Grigor'evic Frank-Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar's relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar's work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way in which Marr's doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today.

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive partly in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colorful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practicing the city, while creating ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favoring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art, one the one hand, significantly differs from official public art while, on the other, including graffiti as its original and most radical style.

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as
necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change
devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement
with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about
the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will
be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will
insist that ‘jesterism’ as ‘prophetic animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs
performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous
wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both
antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of
tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of
the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern
insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church
capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation.

This article explores space imagery in the music of George
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.

In this paper, my aim is to show some of the problems that the figure of the cyborg may raise, in order to show how in many cases the cyborg has been used, even if in a dissimulated way, to reinstate the ‘natural’, normative order with its known distinct and very well defined categories and divisions. But, more importantly, I propose here an alternative to the figure of the cyborg which, I believe, has more possibilities of ‘keeping the promises’ of subverting the normative order of Western thought. This alternative is the one presented by the figure of the grotesque body. The grotesque body, I will argue, contains in itself the seeds of a real hybrid, fragmented, non-binarian thought. The relevance of my proposal is that, in opposition to the cyborg, the grotesque body does not present the dangers of a reinforcement of the old categories which support the powers-that-be in maintaining oppression and domination. Unlike the cyborg, the grotesque body does not make possible a return to the Cartesian frame, with its clear danger of losing one more time the embodied subject (and losing with it the concrete, non-neutral subject), which the postmodern and feminist thought strived so hard to bring to the philosophical and political scene.

In this age of greater accountability, local school districts within the USA increasingly use summer school programs as an intervention service to provide students who have failed to meet classroom, district, or state performance requirements with the opportunity to 'catch up'. Although such programs attempt to provide varying types of educational experiences to improve the student's academic performance, teachers continue to inscribe the expectations and language of schooling. Through examining the actions of Steven, a student diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in a summer intervention program, the author contends that his teachers' adherence to the norms of schooling prevent Steven from engaging in the school classroom in a meaningful way. Steven's teachers read his carnivalistic actions as part of his deviant behavior rather than as a critique of how even the summer curriculum fails to meet his learning needs.

Karnaval kuramı edebiyat dışında sanatın diğer dallarına da uygulanabilen bir kuramdır. Filmler hem metinsel olarak hem de alımlama pratikleri bakımından karnavalesk nitelikler taşıyabilmektedir. Bu çalışmada Mihail Bahtin’in karnaval kuramı çerçevesinde kült film olgusu incelenmiştir. Çalışmada karnavalesk özellikler ışığında kült film kavramının ayırıcı özellikleri ele alınmıştır. Karnaval ve karnavalesk kavramları incelenerek Bahtin’in kuramını oluşturan ana unsurlar araştırılmıştır. Karnavaleskin sinema ile olan bağı gösterildikten sonra kült film kavramı metinsel ve metin-dışı özellikleri bakımından incelenmiştir. ‘Kült film’in sinema alanında alternatif bir kanon olduğu ortaya konulmuştur. Kült filmlerin anaakım sinemaya muhalif oluşu ile karnavaleskin resmî kültürü askıya alışı örtüşmektedir. Karnavalların insanları katılımcılığa sevk edişi gibi kült filmler alımlanış olarak film ile seyirci arasındaki bariyerlerin yıkılmasına olanak sağlar. Karnavallarda insanlar arasındaki dayanışmaya kült film hayranlarında rastlanabilmektedir. Sahip olduğu birtakım yapısal ve üslupsal özellikler nedeniyle kült filmler diğer filmlerden farklılaşmaktadır. Karnavalesk açıdan bu özellikler değişkenlik ve tanımsızlık, sanat ve sanat-dışı ayrımının bulanıklaşması ve ihlal yaratma olarak ortaya çıkmaktadır. Tüm bu özellikler araştırılırken belli başlı kült film örneklerinden yararlanılmış ve kült film konseptinin karnavalesk geleneğin bir örneği olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

The Notion of Cult Film within the Context of Bakhtinian Carnivalesque

Carnival theory is applicable to other branches of art apart from literature. In this study, the phenomenon of cult film has been examined in the context of the carnival theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. Characteristics of the notion of cult film were discussed in consideration of carnivalesque characteristics. The concepts of carnival and carnivalesque were examined and the main elements constituting Bahtin’s theory were researched. After examining the relationship between carnivalesque and cinema, the concept of cult film was researched in terms of textual and non-textual characteristics. It has been asserted that ‘cult film’ constitutes an alternative canon in the area of film. Cult film’s opposition to the mainstream overlaps with suspending of official culture by the carnivalesque. Cult films, like carnivals leading people to participation, allow the barriers between the film and the audience to be demolished. Solidarity among people in carnivals resembles the unity of cult film fans. Cult films differ from other films due to some structural and stylistic features. From the carnivalesque perspective, these features emerge as variability and uncertainty, blurring the distinction between art and non-art, and creating a transgression. While investigating all these features, some cult film examples were used and it was concluded that the concept of cult film is an example of the carnivalesque tradition.

The day before Palm Sunday, early Christians celebrated the biblical figure of Lazarus. This article surveys late ancient liturgical compositions for this feast. It explores the way in which the authors described the disintegration and reintegration of Lazarus’ body. His death and reinvigoration surely point towards the resurrection of Christ; yet the detailed and morbid displays which these liturgical texts create suggest that the authors worked with more complex pallets. I argue that we should resist the temptation of a simplistic reading of the Byzantine liturgical past. Scholars are currently rediscovering the subtleties of Byzantine literary composition, but religious texts are still largely viewed as simple, didactic and naïve. Lazarus actually appears as a grotesquely dynamic corpse. At the same time his body is just as ordinary and human as any of the people who heard the macabre stories. He was them. This makes the liturgical works into texts about the churchgoers’ decay. I suggest that the authors projected the chilling imagery of dissolving bodies with an aim similar to that of modern writers of grotesque literature; it speaks to the ambivalent awareness of human mortality. The homilists and hymnographers addressed the abject embodied experiences of their congregation.

The article considers the theme of Bildung and the educational process in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, with reference to the philosophical tradition in which his ideas stand. This tradition is traced through the work of Hegel, von Humboldt and the Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp. It is shown that Bakhtin’s central essays on the novel are permeated with ideas about education, and that the strengths and weakness of the ideas can be understood only with reference to their philosophical sources. What becomes apparent is the need to root Bakhtin’s illuminating reflections on the relationship between language, world view and the educative role played by the novel in an account of the institutional structure of the society in which they are embedded.

This article explores the distinctive characteristics of present-day drinking habits in Finland. The data are young adults’ narratives of their nights out obtained in interviews that asked about ideal, typical and disastrous nights out. The data set comprises 117 interviews (60 women and 57 men). Questions covered in this article include: What motivates young adults to drink? What kind of self-regulation do they exhibit in their drinking? Is getting drunk a value in itself, or does it have a secondary meaning to other activities? Are there any gender differences in drinking habits? We look specifically at the roles of alcohol in young people’s nights out and how these roles vary during the course of the evening. Furthermore, the analysis looks at how the narratives are structured on the dimensions of goal-oriented linear time and ritualised  repetitive cyclical time. Our analysis shows that the drinking habits of young adults reflect a movement away from the goal-oriented time of the everyday towards the cyclical time of one’s own circle of friends. These breakaways are essentially an exercise in creating and strengthening a general will within the groups. They do not resemble total inversions or  transgressions of the prevailing reality, nor are they about defiance, loutish behaviour, getting legless or locked up. Rather,
these breakaways find mainly culturally regulated and ordered expressions. Indeed one can infer that sociable drinking habits have gained a stronger footing among young adults in Finland today.

Keywords: Drinking habits, intoxication, transgression, young adults, interviews, narrative analysis, sociability

Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin were very different types of thinkers. While the former spent the 1920s maximally involved in the Italian revolutionary movement as leader of the Communist Party, the latter, living in Petrograd at the time of the revolution and throughout the second half of the 1920s, reflected on the experience in religious and philosophical rather than political ways. In the 1930s, while Gramsci languished in Mussolini’s prison, theorizing the process by which the revolutionary party could achieve hegemony and seize political power, Bakhtin was internally exiled in Kazakhstan where he taught in an obscure pedagogical institute and wrote erudite essays on the anti-hegemonic potentialities of the novel in the cultural arena. At first glance little appears to promise a productive comparison. Yet when one looks more closely, continuities of theme, approach and theoretical heritage abound, suggesting a more widespread and deeper meeting of Marxism and idealist philosophies of language than has hitherto been acknowledged. Out of the respective critiques of positivist-dominated social science and romantic aesthetics emerges a strikingly similar pragmatist recasting of the Marxist theory of ideology which anticipates many of the themes of contemporary post-structuralism while embedding the realm of ideas firmly in the social practice of different social groups.

"Abstract
Through an analysis of his lived narratives, the author discusses the formative experiences some preadolescent boys have with nudity/nakedness as well as the initial experiences young male art students and teachers have with the nude in academia, in order to examine how heteronormative ideas about sex—gender and professionalism—limit the possibility of rich educational experiences, affecting both educators and students. The conclusion of this study involves a discussion of the benefits of more inclusive examinations of the various conditions, frameworks, and approaches to interpreting the nude with a focus on specific works of art.
"

Edited by Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov

Interdisciplinary by design and intent, this volume brings together nine essays by established and new scholars from Russia, Britain and North America to explore the historical contexts and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history and linguistics. The articles demonstrate that exploring the background of Bakhtinian thought is a better way of appreciating their significance for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural phenomena.

The comics of Julie Doucet can be productively interpreted in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of the carnivalesque and its aesthetic expression as grotesque realism. By employing subject matter and a visual style grounded in the grotesque, Doucet's comics challenge normative notions of the female body through a process of resignification based in parody and unruly embodiment. These ideas connect to theories of resistance and subversion as articulated by Judith Butler, among others, as well as to formalist theories of style and the ways comics produce meaning and identification. Close readings of Doucet's stories demonstrate how her comics perform a feminist critique by redeploying masculinist tropes belonging to ‘high’ culture as grotesque images in the ‘low’ form of comics. The combination of grotesque subject matter and an untraditional visual style serves to critically unsettle the visual pleasure associated with representations of women in comics.

Boris Groys' article, " Between Stalin and Dionysos " , offers a provocative reading of Mikhail Bakhtin's works, and especially of his notion of carnival, as an " aesthetic justification " of totalitarianism. In this paper I look at that article's weaknesses (as an actual interpretation of Bakhtin) and strengths (in the form of problems in Bakhtin scholarship it helped pose), and respond to it with a more detailed account of the place carnival assumes within Bakhtin's overall philosophical conception and its development over time.

This paper discusses the subversion of the epic and medieval romance tradition through the elements of grotesque realism in William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The play exposes chivalric values, courtly love, and romance values as invalid forms in the new age that is defined in more mercantile terms. Shakespeare shows the absurdity and hypocrisy of the concept of honor and courtly love ideals of the medieval culture through the fool and the go-between, Thersites and Pandarus, who can be interpreted as elements of grotesque realism of medieval folk culture as Bakhtin describes. For Bakhtin, this festive, carnivalesque spirit is crucial in the emergence of the Renais-sance, a new culture with its own set of values and literary forms.
Key Words: Bakhtin, Epic, Courtly Love, Grotesque, The Fool.

The purpose of this article is to explore the political importance of Neapolitan Carnival and the government's involvement in steering and controlling the celebrations at various historical junctions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is particularly important to note in this context the ritual pillages of cuccagne staged by the rulers. The sponsorship of such Carnivalesque entertainments quelled the rulers' fears from popular rebellion and disorder as much as they fed popular needs for bread and circuses; and it is in this context of maintaining intact the city's fragile social balances that we should interpret the ubiquity of these violent spectacles in early modern Naples.

This article argues that a Russian analytical paradigm of carnival culture can help explain the successful presidential campaign of President Donald J. Trump. Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival culture while analyzing Francois Rabelais' work and its connection to the popular culture of Renaissance. Carnival ethos stood in opposition to the 'official' and 'serious' church sanctioned and feudal culture, by bringing out folklore and different forms of folk laughter that Bakhtin denoted as carnival. Carnival culture with its opposition to the official buttoned-up discourse is supposed to be polar opposite, distinguished by anti-ideology and anti-authority, in other words, anti-establishment – the foundation of Trump's appeal to his voters. This article examines the core characteristics of carnival culture that defined Trump's presidential campaign from the start.

This is the English translation (with a brief introduction and relatively detailed commentary) of a long excerpt from Mikhail Bakhtin's notes titled "Additions and changes to Rabelais", written in the mid-1940s with reworking his then unpublished manuscript on François Rabelais in mind. This excerpt is most notable for being the only extant text in which Bakhtin discusses and analyses Shakespeare's tragedies at relative length—a discussion interesting not only as a reading of Shakespeare, but also as an unusual and revealing example of Bakhtin's thought. In addition to Shakespeare, the text deals briefly with Dostoevsky's novels and with Goethe's Faust, as well as with several themes Bakhtin develops in his better-known works, such as Menippean satire, seriousness, and laughter.

This article examines Georges Bataille’s notion of revolution‐as‐festival and his attempt, in his writing of the 1930s, to place theories of affect within the framework of Marxist philosophy. Against the various negative characterisations of this project, it looks at Bataille’s ideas in this period in context, in order to understand their vivid contradictions as an attempt to assert a positive project of affect’s utility to the Left, within and against negative categories in early twentieth‐century cultural and critical thought.

O Círculo de Bakhtin é conhecido pela sua importância para os estudos da linguagem. Considerado um grupo revolucionário e inspirador pelas ideias difundidas pelos intelectuais que o formavam, é também uma grande fonte de indagações para os pesquisadores da área. Muito tem sido publicado sobre o grupo no Brasil, mas só agora a abordagem crítica de Craig Brandist, um dos maiores especialistas do Círculo na atualidade, chega aos leitores.

Fruto de pesquisas em diversos arquivos russos, este livro trata do contexto intelectual e histórico dos trabalhos do Círculo, com riqueza de informações e discussões sobre filosofia da linguagem e sociolinguística soviética. O resultado é um olhar sobre o trabalho do Círculo sob uma nova luz, que põe em questão algumas das “certezas” sobre a figura intelectual de Bakhtin.

King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this rich and fascinating literary tradition, tracing its development across deeply politicised fifteenth-century comic tales and early modern ballads.

The medieval King and Commoner tales depict an incognito king becoming lost in the forest and encountering a disgruntled commoner who complains of class oppression and poaches the king’s deer. This is an upside-down world of tricksters, violence, and politicised feasting that critiques and deconstructs medieval hierarchy. The commoners of these tales utilise the inversion of the medieval carnival, crowning themselves as liminal mock kings in the forest while threatening to rend and devour a body politic that would oppress them. These tales are complex and ambiguous, re-imagining the socio-political upheaval of the late medieval period in sophisticated ruminations on class relations. By contrast, the early modern ballads and chapbooks see the tradition undergo a conservative metamorphosis. Suppressing its more radical elements amid a celebration of proto-panoptical kings, the tradition re-emerges as royalist propaganda in which the king watches his thankful subjects through the keyhole.

https://www.routledge.com/The-King-and-Commoner-Tradition-Carnivalesque-Politics-in-Medieval-and/Truesdale/p/book/9780815364764

The twenty-first century has seen a rise in the number of protests in Kenya's capital city, Nairobi. These protests are being used to assert the practice of democratic freedoms in face of increasingly repressive controls. This article probes the extent to which contemporary protests use, or are animated through, art and activism (artivism). It does so by drawing on 20 months of research in Nairobi (doctoral fieldwork from July 2016 to March 2018), which involved observation and participation in street protests and demonstrations; interviews with twelve artists and activists associated with the social justice organisation PAWA 254, and those responsible for organising street demonstrations; informal interviews with foot soldiers who attend protests and demonstrations; and national/international newsprint, radio and television media. The article argues that artivism's use in protest can be employed to ridicule and mock those in power, it can provide means to mobilise people in novel and often powerful ways, and it has the potential to infuse protest with traits of carnival. But the article also underscores artivism's limitations, such as it potential to divide, antagonise and derail protesters' desired narrative. Given the increasing use of artistic expression by civil society organisations in political protests in Kenya, and indeed across the globe, this article contributes to furthering understandings to artivism's potential in contributing to social change, creating new terrains for political engagement, and the implication this has on democracy.

In the winter of 1622–23, Manila publicly mourned the passing of Philip III and then celebrated the ascension to the throne of his son Philip IV. A series of urban festivals brought together the many different social and ethnic groups of the colony and culminated in the carnival of 1623. As had been the case in colonial cities in the Americas, don Quijote and Sancho joined the party and participated in the jousts and parades of Manila. All this was recorded by soldier Diego de Rueda y Mendoza in his manuscript Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de . . . Felipe IV. Through the examination of this and other unpublished sources, this article studies the popular uses of Cervantes’s novel in relation to the complex linguistic, ethnic, and social makeup of the Philippine capital. It also analyzes the different forms of collective affect and urban sociability prompted by the recontextualization of the Cervantine characters in this peculiar colonial carnival.