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inappropriate behaviour, abnormal or psychopathological mental states, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Despite the apparent heterogeneity of these elements, Bakhtin emphasizes the internal integrity of the genre and its thorough grounding in a carnival sense of the world. He notes its unparalleled capacity for reflecting the social and philosophical ethos of its historical setting – principally the epoch of the decline of national legend, which brought with it the gradual dissolution of long-established ethical norms and a concomitant rise in free interaction and argumentation over all manner of "ultimate questions". The internal dialogical freedom of the genre is coupled with an equally free external capacity for the absorption of other genres, for example the
55:. For Bakhtin, "carnival" (the totality of popular festivities, rituals and other carnival forms) is deeply rooted in the human psyche on both the collective and individual level. Though historically complex and varied, it has over time worked out "an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms" which express a unified "carnival sense of the world, permeating all its forms". This language, Bakhtin argues, cannot be adequately verbalized or translated into abstract concepts, but it is amenable to a transposition into an artistic language that resonates with its essential qualities: it can, in other words, be "transposed into the language of literature". Bakhtin calls this transposition the
178:, often manifesting a critical and even cynical attitude toward conventional subjects and forms. They eschewed the single-voiced, single-styled nature of the serious genres, and intentionally cultivated heterogeneity of voice and style. Characteristic of these genres are "multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic; the use of inserted genres – letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres... a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons..." Thus in the ancient seriocomic genres, language was not merely that which represents, but itself became an object of representation.
115:
symbols was desirable as an ideology. Because participation in
Carnival extracts all individuals from non-carnival life, nihilistic and individualistic ideologies are just as impotent and just as subject to the radical humour of carnival as any form of official seriousness. The spirit of carnival grows out of a "culture of laughter". Because it is based in the physiological realities of the lower bodily stratum (birth, death, renewal, sexuality, ingestion, evacuation etc.), it is inherently anti-elitist: its objects and functions are necessarily common to all humans—"identical, involuntary and non-negotiable".
382:, "threshold" dialogues in extreme or fantastic situations: present in Menippean satire, these qualities are given a new and more profound life in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel. In this "carnival space and time", a reality beyond the quotidian fog of convention and habit comes to life, allowing a special type of "purely human" dialogue to occur. In polyphony, character voices are liberated from the finalizing and monologizing influence of authorial control, much as the participants in carnival revel in the temporary dissolution of authoritarian social definitions and "ready-made" truths, and a new
20:
374:. Bakhtin observes that although Dostoevsky may not have consciously recognized his place as the heir of the tradition, he undoubtedly instinctively adopted many of its carnivalistic forms, as well as its liberated approach to the use of those forms, and adapted them to his own artistic purposes. The dialogic sense of truth, the device of the
119:
and spectators has been detrimental to the potency of
Carnival. Its power lay in there being no "outside". Everyone participated, and everyone was subject to its lived transcendence of social and individual norms: "carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense."
111:
considered absolute, single, monolithic. Carnivalistic symbols always include their opposite within themselves: "Birth is fraught with death, and death with new birth." The crowning implies the de-crowning, and the de-crowning implies a new crowning. It is thus the process of change itself that is celebrated, not that which is changed.
313:
The tradition of
Menippean satire reached its summit in the nineteenth century, according to Bakhtin, in the work of Dostoevsky. Menippean satire was the fertile ground on which Dostoevsky was able to grow his entirely new carnivalized genre—the polyphonic novel. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was
118:
Bakhtin argues that we should not compare the "narrow theatrical pageantry" and "vulgar
Bohemian understanding of carnival" characteristic of modern times with his Medieval Carnival. Carnival was a powerful creative event, not merely a spectacle. Bakhtin suggests that the separation of participants
110:
The primary act of carnival is the mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of a carnival king. It is a "dualistic ambivalent ritual" that typifies the inside-out world of carnival and the "joyful relativity of all structure and order". The act sanctifies ambivalence toward that which is normally
114:
The carnival sense of the world "is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order." This is not to say that liberation from all authority and sacred
94:: with the dissolution of hierarchical relationships, ordinarily unacceptable behaviour becomes acceptable. Behaviour, gesture and discourse that are normally considered eccentric and inappropriate are encouraged, permitting "the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves".
286:
back into carnivalized folklore, whose decisive influence is here even more significant than it is in the
Socratic dialogue." Its characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes,
100:: the familiar and free format of carnival allows all dualistic separations of the hierarchical worldview to reunite in living relationship with one another — heaven and hell, the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the great and the small, the clever and the stupid, etc.
106:: in carnival, the strict rules of piety and respect for official notions of the 'sacred' are stripped of their power — blasphemy, obscenity, debasings, 'bringings down to earth', celebration rather than condemnation of the earthly and body-based.
88:: carnival often brought the unlikeliest of people together, those ordinarily separated by impenetrable socio-hierarchical barriers. The suspension of distance between people encouraged free interaction and free individual expression.
166:". Everything took place "in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries." Unlike the "serious" genres (tragedy, epic, high rhetoric, lyric poetry), the seriocomic genres did not rely on
251:(which will later attain full expression in Dostoevsky): "the idea is organically combined with the image of a person... The dialogic testing of the idea is simultaneously also the testing of the person who represents it".
139:
point out could also be called "the literization of carnival") refers to the transposition of the essential qualities of the carnival sense of the world into a literary language and a literary
194:
and others, a freely creative form bound only by the
Socratic method of dialogically revealing the truth. Bakhtin lists five aspects of the genre that link it to carnivalization:
206:
quality only, and that in the hands of a dogmatic school or religious doctrine the dialogue can be transformed into merely another method for expounding a ready-made truth);
186:
Originally a kind of memoir genre consisting of recollections of actual conversations conducted by
Socrates, the Socratic dialogue became, in the hands of
39:
is a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. It originated as "carnival" in
358:), and possibly also the satires of Varro. He was also probably influenced by modern European manifestations of the genre in authors such as
198:
The
Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth and human thought, posited in opposition to "official monologism, which pretends to
759:
378:, the unencumbered frankness of speech, the clash of extreme positions and embodied ideas over ultimate questions, the technique of
151:
The ancient seriocomic genres initiated the "carnivalistic line" in
Western literature. Of these, the most significant were
216:, the elicitation or provocation of a full verbal expression of the interlocutor's opinion and its underlying assumptions;
792:
45:
24:
752:
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745:
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278:, although it first became recognized as a genre through the first century B.C.E. Roman scholar
879:
848:
797:
308:
244:), which forces a deeper exposition through the loosening of the bonds of convention and habit;
170:
or long-held tribal belief and custom for their legitimacy. Instead they consciously relied on
51:
549:
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438:
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of literature. Although he considers a number of literary forms and individual writers, it is
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Bakhtin identifies four principal categories of the carnival sense of the world.
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73:, that he considers the primary exemplars of carnivalization in literature.
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plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world
162:
According to
Bakhtin, the seriocomic genres always began with "the living
267:
818:
363:
339:
296:
292:
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The tradition known as Menippean satire began in ancient Greece with
371:
349:
288:
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238:(e.g. Socrates on the threshold of an impending death sentence in
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212:, the juxtaposition of differing perspectives on an object, and
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315:
279:
187:
390:, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."
510:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp.
460:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp.
548:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.
437:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.
282:. According to Bakhtin, the roots of the genre "reach
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It introduces, in embryonic form, the concept of the
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227:ideologists, thus provoking the event of the
386:truth emerges in the play of difference: a "
86:Familiar and free interaction between people
733:. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
302:
270:, an author of Socratic dialogues, and the
760:
746:
719:Bakhtinian Thought: An introductory reader
578:Morson, Gary Saul; Emerson, Caryl (1990).
567:. University of Chicago Press. p. 12.
582:. Stanford University Press. p. 461.
565:Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work
529:. Academic Studies Press. pp. 32–33.
712:. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
18:
725:
716:
704:
580:Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
539:
524:
501:
451:
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862:
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69:, and the 19th century Russian author
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646:Morson and Emerson (1990). p. 490–91
527:All the Same the Words Don't Go Away
181:
146:
767:
326:Menippus, or The Descent Into Hades
255:
63:, the French Renaissance author of
25:The Fight Between Carnival and Lent
13:
14:
891:
682:Morson and Emerson (1990). p. 465
129:the carnivalization of literature
793:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
731:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
610:Morson and Emerson (1990). p.461
544:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
506:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
456:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
433:Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
202:" (Bakhtin notes that this is a
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219:The protagonist is always an
123:Carnivalization of literature
49:and was further developed in
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824:Culture of popular laughter
673:Bakhtin (1984). p. 143, 179
655:Bakhtin (1984). pp. 114–120
410:Culture of popular laughter
393:
77:Carnival sense of the world
10:
896:
628:Bakhtin (1984). pp. 110–12
563:Morson, Gary Saul (1986).
306:
259:
223:and the interlocutors are
200:possess a ready-made truth
98:Carnivalistic mésalliances
806:
775:
540:Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984).
502:Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984).
452:Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984).
429:Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984).
234:A tendency to create the
788:The Dialogic Imagination
415:
303:Dostoevsky and polyphony
66:Gargantua and Pantagruel
30:Pieter Bruegel the Elder
807:Concepts and Philosophy
717:Dentith, Simon (1995).
691:Bakhtin (1984). pp. 6–7
525:Emerson, Caryl (2011).
376:extraordinary situation
314:familiar with works by
236:extraordinary situation
849:Polyphony (literature)
798:Rabelais and His World
710:Rabelais and his world
637:Bakhtin (1984). p. 112
619:Bakhtin (1984). p. 109
601:Bakhtin (1984). p. 108
592:Bakhtin (1984). p. 108
492:Bakhtin (1984). p. 160
483:Bakhtin (1984). p. 125
474:Bakhtin (1984). p. 124
309:Polyphony (literature)
52:Rabelais and His World
33:
664:Bakhtin (1984). p 119
321:Dialogues of the Dead
22:
829:Dialogue (Bakhtin)
405:Dialogue (Bakhtin)
34:
875:Literary concepts
857:
856:
182:Socratic dialogue
153:Socratic dialogue
147:Seriocomic genres
71:Fyodor Dostoevsky
61:François Rabelais
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844:Menippean satire
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727:Bakhtin, Mikhail
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880:Comedy genres
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839:Heteroglossia
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814:Carnivalesque
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37:Carnivalesque
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721:. Routledge.
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699:Bibliography
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268:Antisthenes
241:The Apology
104:Profanation
864:Categories
819:Chronotope
384:dialogical
221:ideologist
172:experience
464:-23, 130.
380:anacrisis
340:Petronius
318:(such as
297:symposium
293:soliloquy
274:satirist
231:of truth;
225:made into
214:anacrisis
210:Syncrisis
729:(1929).
708:(1941).
394:See also
372:Voltaire
350:Apuleius
295:and the
289:diatribe
284:directly
276:Menippus
192:Xenophon
368:Diderot
364:FĂ©nelon
229:testing
164:present
137:Emerson
131:(which
514:, 160.
360:Goethe
330:Seneca
316:Lucian
291:, the
204:formal
168:legend
133:Morson
32:(1559)
776:Works
416:Notes
280:Varro
272:Cynic
188:Plato
141:genre
28:, by
370:and
324:and
174:and
155:and
135:and
550:160
512:122
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