Carnivalization
is the liberating and subversive influence of popular humour on the literary
tradition, according to the theory propounded by the Russian linguist Mikhail
Bakhtin in his works Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and
Us World (1965). Bakhtin argued that the overturning of hierarchies in popular
carnival—its mingling of the sacred with the profane, the sublime with the
ridiculous—lies behind the most 'open' literary genres, notably menippean satire
and the novel, especially since the renaissance. Carnivalized
literary forms allow alternative voices to dethrone the authority of official
culture: Rabelais, for example, subverts the asceticism of the medieval Church
by giving free rein to the bodily profanity of folk festivities.