Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2005

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Buckton, Oliver

Abstract

The common intellectual ground shared by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georges Bataille routinely suffers from a dearth of consideration. Yet Bakhtin's celebrated "carnival" writings are invested in undeniably Bataillean interests---death, excess, transgression, heterogeneity. Both Bakhtin and Bataille inherited the Wagnerian Nietzsche's nostalgia for effusive communal ritual, collapsing the boundaries between bodies and the boundary between life and death (this is "transgression," eroticism , according to Bataille; too often transgression is spoken of in terms of stealing a pornographic magazine). Thus bodies in Bakhtin and Bataille are "open," mainly in comic and inglorious ways, and death is the cynosure of festival. Death for Bakhtin and Bataille is not negative; it is "sacred" (Bataille's term), serving as communal cement and a celebration of life. Not, however, life in the sense of 401k's and insurance. Rather, life as exuberance and generosity ("sovereignty" according to Bataille).

Extent

58 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2005.|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT13261

Format

pdf

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