Rabelais And Bakhtin Popular Culture in Gargantua And Pantagruel

"Berrong's systematic refutation of Bakhtin'sRabelais and His Worldis welcome. Its timing and relevance are perfect. What he says had to be said. It cleans the atmosphere, eliminates wrong ideas, puts Rabelais in a proper perspective, and addresses questions of grat importance for our understanding not only of Rabelais, but of sixteenth-century literature as well."Gerard Defaux, Johns Hopkins University. InRabelais and Bakhtin, Richard M. Berrong demonstrates both the historical and textual weaknesses of the argument advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin and his influential studyRabelais and His World.The publication of Bakhtin's book in the West in the late 1960s brought both Rabelais and Bakhtin to the attention of students interested in the "New Criticism" in literature. Bakhtin agrued that the key to Rabelais's narratives was to be found in their language of popular culture, which was intended to free his readers from the ideological "prison house" of official, establishment discourse; to provide them with a nonofficial perspective from which to viewand combatthe establishment and its institutions. Since the publication of Bakhtin's study, scholars such as Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Carlo Ginzburg have shown that the relationship of the upper classes to popular culture changed in the first half of the sixteenth century. Previously these classes had participated fully in the culture of the people (while adhering to their own), but at that time they undertook to exclude popular culture from their lives and from their world. In his refutation of Bakhtin's thesis, Berrong demonstrates the complex and shifting role of popular culture in Rabelais's narratives. His conclusions should interest not only readers ofGargantua and Pantagruelbut all students of the sixteenth century, since the use and exclusion of popular culture is an issue in the study of many of the writers, artists, and composers of the period. Richard M. Berrong is an assistant professor of French at Kent State University. He is the author ofEvery Man for Himself: Social Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais(1985).Berrong, Richard M. is the author of 'Rabelais And Bakhtin Popular Culture in Gargantua And Pantagruel', published 2006 under ISBN 9780803262614 and ISBN 0803262612.