In a Time of Chaos and Misrule, Mardi Gras’ Subversive Message is Virtually Meaningless
…days, the ways in which we can measure the extremities of human experience between the lushness, the decadence, the celebration of Tuesday and the death of Wednesday. “Eat drink and be merry,” somebody once wrote. From the medieval celebrations of Mardi Gras came one of the most useful critical terms in our cultural vocabulary—the carnivalesque. That term is most associated with the twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, in…
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