Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture

Abstract

W A hen Mikhail Bakhtin characterized his Rabelais study as first step in a grand enterprise of studying folk culture of laughter, he was, properly speaking, formulating two mutually intertwined goals.2 The first was to set forth a new interpretation of Gargantua and Pantagruel that would cut away the dross of moralizing-officializing, puritanical-puristic misreadings and that would once more lay