Synecdoche

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin tackles what he considers shortcomings in early 20th-century scholarship on 16th-century French author François Rabelais. The particular value of this book, though, lies not in his reflections on Rabelais per se, but on his lucid consideration of the generative function of the grotesque, the history of laughter, and their encounter in the popular context of the marketplace, reflections that remain remarkably relevant to literary and cultural criticism today. ⇰ Continue Reading