The carnival of negativity

This dissertation critiques Mikhail Bakhtin's interrelated concepts of carnival and dialogue, and the way these concepts inform Bakhtin's stylistic lines of novel development. It reevaluates Bakhtin's project by taking into consideration Bakhtin's biases, the predeterminations of his methods, his stylistic techniques, and his cultural assumptions. In particular it questions the assumptions that carnival and dialogue have liberatory value. Through a number of English and Irish novelists, I suggest that there is a disturbing side to carnival which Bakhtin too often glosses over.; Chapter One presents a summary of Bakhtin's basic ideas. It continues by critiquing Bakhtin's use in American criticism, moving past such criticism to theorists, such as Mikhail Ryklin and Michael Andre Bernstein, who wrestle with Bakhtin's formulations in order to think "bitter carnivals."; The remaining chapters explore the works of individual novelists whose work provides means to rethink Bakhtin. In Chapter Two, Swift's A Tale of a Tub suggests that carnival can be a tool of the state, but a tool never completely controlled. Swift's Gulliver's Travels explores the body as a site of resistance both to society and to carnival.; In Chapter Three, Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle and Humphry Clinker are emblematic of a formalization of carnival which disassociates it from the folk tradition.; In Chapter Four, an exploration of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein questions the claims of Bakhtin's dialogism. The implacable tangibility of the monster's body serves as a useful reminder that bodies can bring dialogue to a halt.; The fifth chapter explores the "Circe" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. Approaching the chapter by way of the many Bakhtinian readings of Joyce, I suggest that Bakhtinian formulations of carnival are inadequate to Joyce's high modernism.; The final chapter concerns the vestiges of Bakhtinian ideas found in the work of Samuel Beckett. It explores the movement of the carnival off of the streets and into the skull. Beckett's carnival, by disassociating itself from the folk, by its inward turn, and by its postulation of an interior void, becomes nothing less than a carnival of negativity.