On The Carnival Features In David Lodge's "Campus Trilogy"

Campus trilogy is David Lodge’s representative work.This thesis is aimed to explore the elements of carnivalization in Lodge’s campus trilogy on the basis of Bakhtin’s carnival theory.According to Bakhtin,carnival sense of the world is the inner spirit of carnivalized literature,which is mainly reflected via carnival images,carnivalistic acts of crowning and decrowning,carnival squares and carnivalistic parodies and its accompanying laughter.David Lodge’s campus trilogy is full of elements of carnivalization.Zapp and Swallow in Changing Places,Persse and Angelica in Small World and Robyn and Vic in Nice Work constitute the carnivalistic contrasting images.Besides,many academic conferences and dining parties in the trilogy take on carnival-square significance.Still,Lodge employs carnival language and quite a lot of carnivalistic parodies to decrown the modern scholars and academic world and create a comic effect,filling the trilogy with carnival laughter.Taking these into consideration,Lodge’s campus trilogy is unquestionably a carnivalized literary work.