ON CARNIVAL AND POPULAR CULTURE

Authors

  • Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti UFRJ

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12957/tecap.2010.11997

Keywords:

CARNIVAL, POPULAR CULTURE, MIKHAIL BAKTHIN, PETER BURKE, ROMANTICISM, GROTESQUE LAUGHTER.

Abstract

Carnival and popular culture are intertwined notions. This article examines the central role of Carnival - understood as a peculiar conjunction of symbolic behaviors and as a concept that summarizes the essential elements of the idea of feast - in the views on popular culture offered by two classic books: Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1987 [1965]), and Popular Culture in the Modern Age, by British historian Peter Burke (1989 [1978]). In the context of this debate, this article examines the legacy of Romanticism in the conceptualization of popular culture, the idea of carnival as a synthesis of the festive and grotesque comic medieval culture and questions which are relevant to the understanding of the cultural processes in general, such as the concepts of large and small tradition, levels of culture, cultural heterogeneity, mediation, and socio-cultural interaction.

Published

2010-11-01

How to Cite

Cavalcanti, M. L. V. de C. (2010). ON CARNIVAL AND POPULAR CULTURE. Textos Escolhidos De Cultura E Arte Populares, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.12957/tecap.2010.11997

Issue

Section

Articles