Carnivalizing Difference Bakhtin and the Other

Arising from a conference under the same name held at Texas Tech University, "Carnivalizing Difference" seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural Forms from Aristophanes to Spike Lee, address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.

It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term. Arising from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University, Carnivalizing Difference seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural forms, then address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.

Introduction - Beginning the Dialogue: Bakhtin and the Others. 1. Alienated Couples in Euripidean Tragedy: A Bakhtinian Analysis 2. Novelistic Discourse in Aristophanes 3. Victory without Defeat? Carnival Laughter and its Appropriation in Pindar's Victory Odes 4. Degenerate Neoptolemus: Praise Poetry and the Novelization of the Aeneid 5. The Tomb of the Epic: Bakhtinian Parody and Petronius' Tale of the Widow of Ephesus 6. The Otherness of History in Rabelais' Carnival and Juvenal's Satire, or Why Bakhtin Got it Right the First Time 7. The Last Laugh: Carnivalizing the Feminine in Piron's La Puce 8. Carnivalizing Irish Catholicism: Austin Clarke's The Sun Dancers at Easter 9. Reading the Other, Reading Other Readings: Bakhtin, Willa Cather and the Dialogics of Critical Response 10. Difference and Convention: Bakhtin and the Practice of Travel Literature 11. Bakhtin in Brooklyn: Language in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Peter I. Barta is Senior Lecturer in Russian Studies and Head of Russian at the University of Surrey, UK. Paul Allen Miller is Associate Professor of Classics and Director of Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, USA. Charles Platter is Professor of Classics at the University of Georgia, USA. David Shepherd is Professor of Russian and Director of The Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, UK.