Poetics Among The People: Carnival Poetics

Bakhtin is a great thinker with profound carnivalization whose poetics thoughts are broad and profound like the splendid sky of stars, which shine the light of profound thought. Carnival poetics is just the brightest constellation in the sky. Although Bakhtin does not sum up a tight logical system for carnival poetics, we can find a root system based on Bakhtin's philosophical thoughts under some separate concept trees. This thesis tries to analyze Bakhtin poetics by tracing back to its origin of culture anthropology, analyzing its basic concept, building up its structure, revealing its value and significance to culture and humanity. Witchcraft, labor and carnival are three important living ways of primitive man. Imagination creates a dreamlike world for human and gives human strong and crazy feelings with real word. Many proofs of culture humanity prove that human are once cling to the state of extreme happiness, which we regard as the early bud of carnival by medicine, wine, dance and rites. We still can find some remains of carnival in the African primitive tribes or in the old folk festival customs.In Roman time of ancient Greece, a series of carnival festival composed of important living contents for mankind. Carnival life had a long time more than three months in Europe of middle age. Mankind creates intimate and humorous life besides frightened and serious official life. In the Renaissance carnival life reached its peak while carnivalization world feelings infiltrate in every field of culture life. Carnival became the dream of the youth period of mankind. In 17th century, carnival life gradually slacked off and broke up into two lines, one struggled to exist among thepeople and the other led to mask performance of the imperial court. Up to modern times, with development of bourgeoisie culture, carnivals deteriorated into some remains such as banquet and drink, wedding and funeral, sports and match etc sporadically. So its influence on other culture weakened greatly. Through investigation on carnival history, Bakhtin created carnival poetics and revealed historical origins relationship between carnival and culture.Bakhtin believes that human life can be divided into official life and folk life. In folk life, festival carnival life symbolized by carnival festival has extremely significance for mankind. This kind of life come to carnival world feelings, which is a kind of folk world outlook, value concept, universe concept of long standing and well established, carnival ceremony, which is the sum total of all carnival ceremony, rites and forms, and carnivalization language which is special language formed in carnival festival with carnival world feelings and is rich and unique language completely different from official languages. Their infiltration and transform towards literature constitute carnivalization. The basic framework of carnival poetics is carnival festival-carnival ceremony-carnivalization. It is a transform course of life-rites-text. This thesis discusses the features of carnival ceremony and carnivalization with much space. The external feature of carnival ceremony is of all the people, of rites, of intimate relationship. Its internal features are world feelings of carnival ceremony, dual nature, relativity of happiness. Main features of carnivalization are direct description of carnival festival and celebration, carnival ceremony graft onto literature, generalities of Carnival Square, space-time carnivalization, and dual-nature images. All these features centralize in world feelings of carnival ceremony full of the spirit of supersede and change, of death and rebirth, of destroying all and renewing all.This thesis divides a series of concepts of Bakhtin poetics into style, technique, and figures to analyze and study after clarifying the frame structure of carnival poetics. The style of Bakhtin poetics can be divided into solemn and banter, polyphony and grotesgue, three literature aesthetic concepts extracted by Bakhtin after studying Roman literature in ancient Greece...