5/8/2023 0 Comments Bakhtin rabelais![]() More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good – and right kind of – laugh.įifty years ago, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin presented Gargantua and Pantagruel as a unique and foreign world, at once beautiful and repulsive. ![]() For the good doctor, grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. No matter how you approach them, they are volcanic and titanic, immense and elemental.Īnd this is how Rabelais wanted it. Driven by an insatiable hunger for both food and knowledge, endowed with great intellectual as well as physical brawn, and prone to laughter as seismic as an earthquake, the eponymous father-and-son duo overwhelm. Several years, and several hundred pages later, he loosed Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64) on the world. ![]() ![]() In early 16th-century France, François Rabelais, who had already made his reputation as a doctor of theology and of medicine, a scholar and a scallywag, turned his hand to novel-writing. ![]()
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