Title

Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nevertheless

DOI

10.5195/dpj.2017.221

Abstract

Boris Groys seems pretty serious. Not much of a laugher. Not a member of the laughing folk. Maybe that’s why what Groys says about Bakhtin and his theory of carnival feels so stunningly, almost unfathomably, wrong to us. For although we grew up centuries and an ocean away from the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance that Bakhtin evokes and idealizes, we did grow up—we first became our selves—among the laughing folk of the rural Midwest of the United States. However serious we have since become as scholars and professors, Bakhtin’s writing on carnival reminds us of home—of families and communities with their own limits and violences, certainly, but also with a life-sustaining laughter that we’ve needed in the academy and other spaces dominated by fear and an official truth.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

Publisher Statement

Copyright © University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. This article first appears in Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal 5 (2017): 53-60.

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Citation Example for Article (Chicago):

Lensmire, Timothy J., and Nathan Snaza. "Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nevertheless." Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal 5 (2017): 53-60.

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