Carnivalesque

Abstract: In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benitez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benitez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean-the area's discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics-there emerges an "island" of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benitez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillen, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodriguez Julia.

Abstract: Public masquerades were a popular and controversial form of urban entertainment in England for most of the eighteenth century. They were held regularly in London and attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from all ranks of society who delighted in disguising themselves in fanciful costumes and masks and moving through crowds of strangers. The authors shows how the masquerade played a subversive role in the eighteenth-century imagination, and that it was persistently associated with the crossing of class and sexual boundaries, sexual freedom, the overthrow of decorum, and urban corruption. Authorities clearly saw it as a profound challenge to social order and persistently sought to suppress it. The book is in two parts. In the first, the author recreates the historical phenomenon of the English masquerade: the makeup of the crowds, the symbolic language of costume, and the various codes of verbal exchange, gesture, and sexual behavior. The second part analyzes contemporary literary representations of the masquerade, using novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Inchbald to show how the masquerade in fiction reflected the disruptive power it had in contemporary life. It also served as an indispensable plot-catalyst, generating the complications out of which the essential drama of the fiction emerged. An epilogue discusses the use of the masquerade as a literary device after the eighteenth century. The book contains some 40 illustrations.

Abstract: Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the "translinguistic" critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism, the question of language difference in the cinema, issues of national culture in Latin America, and "the carnivalesque" in literature and film. He discusses literary works by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Jarry and treats films by Vigo, Bunuel, Wertmuller, Imamura, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Marleen Gooris, and others. Now in paperback, Subversive Pleasures is a splendidly lucid introduction to the central concepts and analytical methods of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.

Abstract: Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In "After Bakhtin", David Lodge sketches Bakhtin's extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas - on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourse, and on the carnivalesque - to the writings of authors as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Fay Weldon and Martin Amis. Further essays study particular texts - by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Milan Kundera - illustrative of the development of the novel in its classic, modernist and postmodernist phases. Two final essays reflect on the current state of academic criticism.