01 August 2008

Carnivalesque

A few of you mentioned that you might be interested in thinking more about Djuna Barnes. I wanted to recommend the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the "carnivalesque" as a place to begin to think about how Barnes turns her attention towards the transgressive and perverse elements of human life in order to humanize them. For Bakhtin, and other theorists of the carnivalesque, the lampooning of power and the freedom (through spectacle) of transgression made aspects of the carnivalesque deeply related to questions of freedom and emancipation.

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