The Form of Carnival in Under the Volcano

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Arac

The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.

Author(s):  
Michael F. Bernard-Donals
Keyword(s):  

1982 ◽  
Vol 27 (12) ◽  
pp. 1004-1004
Author(s):  
Martha T. Shuch Mednick
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Monique Lyle

This essay seeks to dispel entrenched critical opinion regarding dance across Nietzsche's writings as representative of Dionysian intoxication alone. Taking as its prompt the riposte of Alain Badiou, ‘Nietzsche is miles away from any doctrine of dance as a primitive ecstasy’ and ‘dance is in no way the liberated bodily impulse, the wild energy of the body’, the essay uncovers the ties between dance and Apollo in the Nietzschean theory of art while qualifying dance's relation to Dionysus. Primarily through an analysis of The Dionysiac World View and The Birth of Tragedy, the essay seeks to illuminate enigmatic statements about dance in Nietzsche (‘in dance the greatest strength is only potential, although it is betrayed by the suppleness of movement’ and ‘dance is the preservation of orderly measure’). It does this through an elucidation of the specific function of dance in Nietzsche's interpretation of classical Greece; via an assessment of the difficulties associated with the Nietzschean understanding of the bacchanal; and lastly through an analysis of Nietzsche's characterization of dance as a symbol. The essay culminates in a discussion of dance's ties to Nietzschean life affirmation; here the themes of physico-phenomenal existence, joy and illusion in Nietzsche are surveyed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Željka Flegar

This article discusses the implied ‘vulgarity’ and playfulness of children's literature within the broader concept of the carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965) and further contextualised by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992). Carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales are examined by situating them within Cristina Bacchilega's contemporary construct of the ‘fairy-tale web’, focusing on the arenas of parody and intertextuality for the purpose of detecting crucial changes in children's culture in relation to the social construct and ideology of adulthood from the Golden Age of children's literature onward. The analysis is primarily concerned with Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982) and J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007/2008) as representative examples of the historically conditioned empowerment of the child consumer. Marked by ambivalent laughter, mockery and the degradation of ‘high culture’, the interrogative, subversive and ‘time out’ nature of the carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales reveals the striking allure of contemporary children's culture, which not only accommodates children's needs and preferences, but also is evidently desirable to everybody.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongjing Kang ◽  
Chigozirim Utah Sodeke

This essay emphasizes the writing of dialogical research as a crucial step in the dialogical research process. Dialogical research accounts should not suppress the ongoing struggles that accompany a genuine desire to engage dialogically in research contexts. Thus, we advocate and model evocative retellings of these struggles. Questioning our own fieldwork based on the work of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, we highlight principles of dialogue that also serve as guidelines for dialogical research reporting: unfinalizability, engaging paradoxes, and creative (critical) transformation.


1970 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
Євген Карпенко

У статті проаналізовано місце феномену емоційної компетентності в становленні дискурсу життєтворення особистості. Відзначено, що її засадничими ознаками є відкритість і діалогічність, що фасилітують процеси життєтворчості в інтра- та інтерпсихічному просторі та сприяють здобуттю певних експірієнтальних «знань» і формуванню відповідних комунікативних «умінь». Отже, емоційна компетентність виконує функцію орієнтації в знаково-символічній реальності внутрішнього та зовнішнього середовища і, відповідно, бере участь у прийнятті рішень стосовно них. Це сприяє реалізації функції особистісного вибору у значущих обставинах життя. Вважається, що цей вибір повинен ґрунтуватися на домінуючій екзистенційній ідентичності та релевантно реалізовуватися на всіх її рівнях: базовому, характерологічному, ситуативному. В цьому контексті емоційна компетентність виступає в якості з’єднувальної ланки між ідентичністю та її зовнішньою поведінковою маніфестацією, в якій вона, власне, й проявляється. Інтегруючи первинні емоції, емоційна компетентність сприяє формуванню системи цінностей, мотивів і світоглядних орієнтацій особистості, а також сприяє їх коректному втіленню в практиці міжособистісного спілкування і, відповідно, конструювання дискурсу власного життя. У цьому полягає ключова роль емоційної компетентності в процесі життєтворення особистості. The article analyzes the role of emotional competence in establishing the discourse of personal life creation. It has been stated that its basic features are openness and readiness to dialog that facilitate life creation processes in the intra- and interpsychic space and promote acquirement of certain experiential "knowledge" as well as formation of relevant communicative "skills". So, emotional competence has a function of orienting in sign and symbol reality of the internal and external environment and, therefore, takes part in decision-making in respect thereof. This enables realization of the function of personal choice in significant life circumstances.  This choice is considered to be based on dominant existential identity and realized in the relevant manner at all its levels: basic, characterological, situational. In this sense emotional competence forms a link between identity and its outer behavioral manifestation.  While integrating primary emotions emotional competence facilitates formation of a system of values, motives and world view of personality as well as their correct implementation in the course of interpersonal communication and personal life discourse construction. This embodies the key role of emotional competence in the process of life creation of personality.


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