The Carnivalesque

Bakhtine a décrit le carnaval comme un espace utopique, populiste et festif. Mon propos est que le Grand Magal, un événement religieux mouride au Sénégal ainsi qu'une fête nationale populaire, partage de nombreux parallèles notables avec le carnaval, un argument qui permet de mieux comprendre son importance de même que sa nature. Tout comme le carnaval, le Grand Magal est un espace contradictoire où les oppositions binaires s'estompent : les participants y célèbrent non seulement leur foi mais aussi leur existence humaine en embrassant les plaisirs mondains. Temporairement libérée des règles et des rôles habituels dictés par la vie quotidienne, la communauté mouride peut envisager le futur et le renouvellement, et ainsi échapper aux difficultés de la réalité. Fondée en 1887 par le Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba – fondateur du mouvement soufi musulman – à la suite d'une vision sacrée, la ville de Touba, au Sénégal, est le centre spirituel des Mourides. Chaque 18 Safar, au mois de novembre, environ 4 à 5 millions de Soufis font leur pèlerinage – leur zyara – à Touba. Celui-ci se nomme le Grand Magal : le Magal Gu Ma en wolof. Mag signifie « être important » ou « être vieux ». Magal peut donc être traduit par « célébration » ou « anniversaire » (Coulon 1999 : 196). Pendant le Magal, les disciples mourides – les talibés – font une circumambulation autour des monuments associés au Fondateur, tels que sa tombe, qui se trouve dans la grande mosquée construite en son honneur. Ils présentent des offrandes à leurs marabouts et surtout font des oblations au Khalife Général, qui est

The essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "carnevalization" to reconstruct the poetics of Kurt Schwitters's Dadaist and Constructivist "Merzkunst". Works discussed include the poem "An Anna Blume" and the collage "Merzbild 25 A: Das Sternenbild".

Russian formalism is the European counterpart of the Anglo-American New Criticism. And in this formalism, there are elements categorized under it – Baring the device, Defamiliarization, Retardation of the Narrative, Naturalization, and Carnivalization. This literary criticism will be done on Karel Capek’s literary work: “Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.). Having said this, “Rossum’s Universal Robots” or R.U.R., shows several elements that would make it appealing to Russian formalists. The element which will be focused in this literary piece will be ‘Carnivalization’, which is coined by Mikhail Bakhtin. There will be three points that will be talked about: (1) what is carnivalization, (2) where is carnivalization shown in the novel using the four categories of carnivalization presented, and (3) how does carnivalization affect the novel.

Global Tribe explores the visionary arts dance movement of psytrance, which has mushroomed globally since its beginnings in Goa in the 1970s/1980s. Based on extensive international research, as the first detailed work on psychedelic trance, the book investigates the diverse roots and global proliferation of this music and festival culture. Consideration of comparative aesthetics, spiritual technologies and controversies with studied attention to internal dynamics will strike appeal among those holding academic and popular interests at the intersection of ritual, music and culture.

This chapter examines the relationship between collective trauma and comedy as a meaningful cultural ritual. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emile Durkheim, Scepanski highlights the temporal aspects of these theorists' work to note the ways in which comedy manages the emotional and political intensities initiated by events like 9/11.

Since 1990, The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have constituted a production sub-context within the series, having their own conventions and historical trajectory. These specials incorporate horror plots and devices, as well as general references to science fiction, into the series’ base in situation comedy. The Halloween specials disrupt the series usual family-oriented sitcom structure, dissolving the ideological balances that stabilise that society. By depicting the Family and community in extreme circumstances, in seeing the horror of ‘how things could be’, the Treehouse episode leave us with hanging questions about the nature of social being that bleed into the regular sitcom-style episodes. By breaking from the comparatively realistic social-satire that characterizes the series as a whole, the Halloween specials cast a reflexive gaze back onto “The Simpsons” itself. As a result, the “Treehouse” episodes are valuable as a means of examining the strategies and implications of the series as a whole. Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque is utilised to underscore these disruptive traits that characterise the Treehouse episodes.

The antihero Harley Quinn was first introduced as the Joker's "henchwench" in Batman: The Animated Series (1992). The character soon developed a dedicated fan base, including enthusiasts who did not conform to traditional definitions of comic book fans. Recognizing Harley Quinn's popularity, DC Comics subsequently incorporated the character into comic book continuity. Today, Harley Quinn is a transmedia icon extended across multiple media platforms. In this article, audience research and creator interviews were performed to show how Harley Quinn has been used by both fans and industry stakeholders to transform long-standing (and often outdated) definitions of comic book fandom. Much of Harley Quinn's transformative potential comes from invoking a carnivalesque tradition that defies boundaries. Harley Quinn's popularity is not simply symptomatic of a widening comic book fandom but was active in that transformation.

This paper investigates the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin as a means of critically examining the practices of contemporary visual artists. Directly building upon and critiquing Deborah J. Haynes’ 1995 study Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, Jordan and Haladyn argue for the importance of using the dialogic and carnivalesque in an examination of contemporary art, specifically works that use the body of the artist and/or the body of the spectator as key elements within the work. Artists discussed include: James Luna, Rebecca Belmore, Andrea Fraser, Jannis Kounellis, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Ron Benner.

Elevée au degré de caractéristique essentielle, ou bien de loi des mondes fictionnels tant ludiques que dramatiques, la figure du renversement illustre l'épistémè de la Renaissance tardive avec un enthousiasme fou et sage à la fois. Elle s'incarne en deux séries, l'une théologique, l'autre rhétorique et littéraire, dualité qu'il faut dépasser pour mieux comprendre le phénomène du renversement. D'une part, appartiennent à notre matière les adages et dogmes chrétiens de la chute, de la région du dissemblable et du diabolique comme hypostases du renversement du divin et comme renversement de ces hypostases. La chute aurait transformé l'humanité en ce qu'elle est dans l'interminable aujourd'hui, signe fatidique, en creux, du divin. A son tour, l'augustinienne regio dissimilitudinis dans laquelle persiste cette race pécheresse qui ne garde en elle qu'une pâle image de Dieu, vit sous la menace d'une absence de sens où toutes les actions humaines, en restant pure forme, sont privées de communauté d'essence avec le divin. Finalement, la figure du diable qui anime l'imaginaire occidental résistant au despotisme de l'Un la croyance et, plus tard, la raison -s'explique allégoriquement dans la perspective d'un Dieu infiniment plus puissant et glorieux que le prince des ténèbres, mais formellement et illusoirement semblable à lui.

During the latter decades of the twentieth century there was a steady rise in the number of event-specific festivals that were designed to broaden the participation of Australian audiences in new forms of community-based entertainment. 

This investigation explains how the processual phases of Paulo Freire’s conscientização process were applied as guiding principles within the context of an event-specific theatre-making project that involved multiple cohorts of undergraduate participants over an eight-year period.  The thesis is grounded in the empirical experience of their cultural praxis as theatre-makers who collaborated to devise and present street theatre, parades, and cabarets for performance amongst V8 motor sport enthusiasts.

Recent literature concerning critical performance autoethnography is reviewed.  Ethnohistoric primary source documentation is used to develop a multi-case study that examines how certain categories of embedded theory - conscientização, the carnivalesque aesthetic, popular theatre theory, and permaculture design principles – contributed to the evolvement of a new approach for guiding the work of devising original entertainments for event-specific popular audiences. 

This investigation demonstrates how Baz Kershaw’s theoretical/conceptual categories concerning ‘the dialectical processes of community-based performance’ and ‘the radical in performance’ can be used as analytic tools for critically evaluating instances of ‘performance beyond theatre’.  This line of inquiry results in the articulation of new propositions for the processual conduct of devising event-specific entertainments.

Five conclusions concerning practice as research into performance are drawn from this study.  (1) When grounded in ethnohistoric primary source documentation, critical performance autoethnography offers theatre practitioners a new epistemic stance for using their own theatre practice as the basis for conducting theoretical/conceptual research into live performance.  (2) The conscientização process, as characterised by Paulo Freire, provides a pertinent guide for the conduct of dramaturgical research that is designed to generate original entertainments for event-specific popular audiences.  (3) When applied as informing principles for production processes that are designed for these purposes, the conscientização process displays conceptual symmetries with the characteristic phases of theatre production.  (4) Kershaw’s propositions concerning ‘the dialectical processes of community-based performance’ and ‘the radical in performance’ represent cogent new principles that can be used for guiding pre-production dramaturgical research as well as providing analytic categories for interrogating performative outcomes.  (5) When attention is paid to Kershaw’s ‘points of process’ concerning the ‘radical in performance’, those processes will promote the conscientização of theatre-makers as they labour to devise original entertainments for performance amongst event specific popular audiences.

Keywords: conscientização; conscientisation; devised performance; the ‘radical in performance’; event-specific theatre; popular theatre; the carnivalesque; permaculture design principles; ecologies of performance; qualitative research; theoretical/conceptual research; critical performance autoethnography; embedded multi-case study.

Language: English
Document Type: Research Thesis (PhD)

This essay examines the ideological power of Carnival and the carnivalesque on the Colombian Caribbean Coast by circumnavigating the dominant narrative about these events as primarily stages to transgress social norms and resist authority. Instead, it explores whether blackface and other forms of racial impersonation performed during these festivities are globally migrating manifestations of anti-Blackness. It argues that in order to achieve visual resonance, performers rely on taken-for-granted propositions about how Blackness works in Colombian society and that in the absence of such objectivated social knowledge, as Stuart Hall describes it, the racialized characters Las Negritas Puloy, Las Palenqueras/Las Negras Bollongas, and El Son de Negro would be illegible to audiences. These three popular representations of Blackness ascribe particular behaviors and ways of being to phenotypic variations associated with Blackness (skin complexion, hair texture, body type, etc.). This essay demonstrates the racial subordination that can develop, fester, and be reproduced through debasing cultural productions in an environment where anti-Black racism is typically invisibilized and trivialized.

Each year in June, the Dutch island of Terschelling turns into a natural stage for the Oerol festival. This 10-day cultural event offers its visitors a unique carnival of indoor and outdoor theatrical and artistic experiences. Over the years, this recurring event has grown into a contemporary cultural tradition. The island's relative remoteness contributes to the ritual of disengagement from daily life, and  to the immersion into a temporal, parallel world, where one can play and let go.  Through active engagement of the festival visitors, and the integration of the landscape in works of art and in theatre productions, the entire island becomes a constructed location, where in dialogue with the natural environment the consumption of culture leads to a deep sense of space.

This article explores the subculture of cosplay, short for ‘costume play’. In this particular practice, fans create and wear costumes that allow them to re-enact existing fictional characters from popular culture. These outfits and subsequent performances are a physical manifestation of their immersion into the fictional realms of television, games and movies, among others. Cosplay can be understood as the culture of costuming that occurs beyond the institutional remit of the theatre. Especially in western countries, cosplay is intimately connected to the carnivalesque space of the fan convention, where fans gather and re-enact their favourite characters. I argue that embodiment plays a unique role in cosplay that should be interrogated closely. The fan performer relies on multiple bodies and repertoires that are intimately connected to the fan’s identity and the performed character.

This research paper endeavors to trace the anarcho-centric nature of Alex Pina's Money Heist by the application of Naom Chomsky's notion of ‘Anarchy’ with a prime focus on the intentions and actions of the protagonist and primary characters. Through a comprehensive analysis of the narrative, the paper will attempt to research the anarchic beliefs of the characters. It will also examine Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of ‘Carnivalesque’ while centering on his concept of the carnival, group structure, and laughter. It will attempt additionally to study the anarchist history of Spain, including the Catalonian rebellion of 1936; therefore, attempting to understand the origin of the anti-capitalist, carnivalesque, and anarchist ideology in Spain. In light of the work of Miguel Igualada, the study will attempt to link the effect of the 2008 Spanish housing crisis with the content creation in the country. It will draw parallels between the actions of the Professor and Spanish anarchist activist, Enrik Duran. Further, the paper will attempt to trace practices of State domination in the series concerning the role of the mass media with regard to Chomsky's ‘Manufacturing Consent’.  Finally, the paper will attempt to explore the effect of power structures on groups while scrutinizing state practices like surveillance through the application of Michael Foucault's theory of ‘Power/Knowledge’.

This article examines the tensions between power, performance and play within the Caribbean carnival in Trinidad, whose carnival traditions have spread across the African diaspora, and Leeds in Northern England, home to the longest-running Caribbean carnival in Europe.

One of the main criticisms aimed at contemporary Caribbean carnivals is that they no longer seek to challenge the power of the establishment but have become a spectacle of the body and a celebration of capitalist consumerism.

This article asks if contemporary Caribbean carnival in Trinidad and Leeds are indeed all about sequins and bikinis, a vanity show that satisfies the tourist and male gaze, or if at the heart of carnival we still find a uniquely subversive performance aimed at overturning unjust, hierarchical systems of power.

The comics of Julie Doucet can be productively interpreted in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of the carnivalesque and its aesthetic expression as grotesque realism. By employing subject matter and a visual style grounded in the grotesque, Doucet's comics challenge normative notions of the female body through a process of resignification based in parody and unruly embodiment. These ideas connect to theories of resistance and subversion as articulated by Judith Butler, among others, as well as to formalist theories of style and the ways comics produce meaning and identification. Close readings of Doucet's stories demonstrate how her comics perform a feminist critique by redeploying masculinist tropes belonging to ‘high’ culture as grotesque images in the ‘low’ form of comics. The combination of grotesque subject matter and an untraditional visual style serves to critically unsettle the visual pleasure associated with representations of women in comics.

Love and hate, odi et amo: These two trifling words can perhaps explain the full spectrum of human emotion. When Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat was published in 1981, the critical reception was split between adoration and annoyance. It was nominated for the National Book Award and Anthony Burgess called it one of the best novels of the 20th century (1984). And yet, it failed to sell. According to Theroux, all it took was one disparaging review in the New York Times to strangle “the baby in its crib” (Moore, “Interview” 33). Even though it received a reprint in paperback in 1996, Darconville’s Cat lacked financial success and went more or less unnoticed until it received its popular renaissance in the late 2000s. Following a retrospective of Theroux’s four novels by Colin Marshall in 2010, numerous articles and reviews appeared, especially on the social cataloging website Goodreads. Prior to the revitalization, two scholarly articles and half an issue of the Review of Contemporary Literature was all that was available.  Now, even though it has been largely forgotten for decades, the efforts of a small, dedicated readership has helped with the Cat’s comeback. The question persists for many readers: Why has Darconville’s Cat not received greater public and critical acclaim?

Alexander Theroux's Darconville’s Cat (1981) weaves a network of interrelated stories and texts to transport the story of one man’s misery from individual experience into a universal musing on love and hate. Grounded between postmodern Maximalism and traditional Encyclopedism, between satiric excess and parodic self-reflexivity it is a paradoxical in-between novel. This thesis asks how authors represent an illusion of totality in the finite space of a text: When the world grows increasingly more complex, how can this complexity be represented in a novel?

Shakespeare's fools have a long history: while some (like Hamlet) use madness as a cloak to hide their designs, other 'true fools' could speak often brutal truths with impunity. The fool may be foolish or possess natural wisdom and truth.
    Death in the Danse Macabre has much in common with the fool. He can caper about like a madman and yet hold out a mirror to everyone as he confronts them with their true nature, without showing any respect for wealth or status. Death is sometimes presented as the fool's alter ego: Hans Holbein the Younger juxtaposed the two in one of his 'Images of Death' woodcut designs.
    The fool was not included in the mural that was created in Paris in 1424-25, but he was to become a regular character, perhaps through the influence of the German carnival tradition and such works as Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) of 1494. Perhaps Shakespeare's melancholic Jaques had in mind both this satire and the Danse Macabre in his final farewell to the fool Touchstone and assembled company in As You Like It:
    And you to wrangling; for thy loving voyage
    is but for two months victualled. So to your pleasures;
    I am for other than for dancing measures.

This dissertation proposes a fantastical experience analogue to the historical experience proposed by Frank Ankersmit. It investigates how contemporary popular fantasy literature may provoke an experience of the fantastical within its readers, and serve to enrich the reader's experience of reality. After proposing this theory, this dissertation examines Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere as a case study. It concludes that the unique mixture of actual history with fictionalised and fantastical history serves to imaginatively transport its readers to a new realm.

This thesis is dedicated to the cinema art of Kira Muratova with the focus on the theme of grotesque. Kira Muratova shot films of different genres; mixing styles, creating a new reality of cinema, mixing audio-visualization of people with animals, classical literature with slang, including photography and pornography, installation, performance, opera and ballet. Due to this fact, her films provide rich objects of research in Visual Culture Studies. This study is concerned with the audio-visual effects, images and scenes connected to the theme of grotesque in the auteur cinema of Kira Muratova.

Deliberately departing from the possible socio-historical context, the author of the project presents intertextuality of Muratova's film.This thesis includes a detailed analysis of images and shots of several films with a focus on grotesque and along with general description of the director’s main devices. It searches for meanings, denotations and connotations in the films’ images as the essential elements of the films. In addition to an overview of the whole art of director and auteur features, the project deals in more details with two recent films by Muratova— Two in One (2006) and Melody for a Street Organ (2009). Both films are examples of post-modern cinema, and represent ironically, controversially, abruptly, painfully, but truthfully, many important cultural and philosophical issues and essences: arts, man and his place in the world, his relation to other living beings. Semiotics, auteur theory, other theories of film studies, linguistics and psychoanalysis in their postmodern appearances have been applied to the analysis of Kira Muratova's film.

Resumen En términos simples, la murga es un componente del Carnaval uruguayo, pero en realidad es mucho más: es teatro, es música, es identidad, es mito, es crítica política, es la voz del pueblo. Una murga es un grupo de teatro musical popular que canta y actúa en los tablados de los barrios durante el Carnaval de Montevideo (enero-marzo). Es una de las categorías oficiales del Carnaval de la actualidad, junto con las comparsas de candombe, los parodistas, los humoristas y las revistas, y es el componente más políticamente subversivo del Carnaval. La murga critica, satiriza y cuestiona a la sociedad, a los políticos, y las situaciones constantemente, pero nunca se autodefine como política ni teórica. Simplemente es una forma de arte popular, que a pesar de que un sector pequeño, mayormente el sector rico y conservador, la considere poco culta, tiene un nivel intelectual elevado en muchos de sus exponentes. Es una manera de llevar los asuntos que afectan a la mayoría a la masa popular, a los tablados que se llenan todas las noches de Carnaval. Este artículo postula resumir la historia del Carnaval uruguayo y la murga, al igual que hacer un análisis de textos de dos murgas de dos épocas diferentes. Palabras clave Murga – Carnaval – Cultura popular – Teatro popular – Performance. Abstract Murga is, in its simplest terms, popular musical theater of Uruguayan Carnival, but in reality it is much more than this. It is theater, music, identity, myth, political criticism; it is the voice of the people. The murga is a group of popular musical theater whose members sing and act on various tablados –neighborhood makeshift stages– and it is the most political component of Uruguayan Carnival. The murga criticizes, satirizes and questions society, politicians and situations constantly, but it never defines itself as political nor theoretical. It is simply a form of popular art. It is a way to take the issues, which affect everyone, to the masses, to the tablados which are filled every night of Carnaval. During the dictatorship, which brought with it censorship of every sort, murgas were censored just like all artistic endeavors. However, murgas were able to subvert the censorship of their lyrics, permitting them to criticize the outrages and crimes of the government with the music itself. Although the political situation has now changed dramatically, the murga is still a necessary element of Uruguayan socio-political discourse. This article aims to summarize the history of Carnival in Uruguay and specifically the murga, as well as to analyze song lyrics from historically important shows from two different eras.

The prestige that the English Language used to enjoy in Sri Lanka during the British rule did not diminish or disappear even after her independence in 1948. While English continues to be the global language in Sri Lanka for several important fields of activity such as trade and commerce, science and technology, medicine and engineering, law and international relations, those who are competent in English receive priority in employment and higher education, leaving behind the others whose knowledge of the language is limited or insufficient. Although the national education policy allows every schoolchild a teaching programme of ten years leading to a working knowledge of English, which is a compulsory subject at the GCE (O/Levels) Examination, the products of all the schools in Sri Lanka do not achieve the recognised standard of the language which has remained for ever a mystery. Facilities available for learning English have become a criterion for a school to be graded as popular or prestigious. The male or female or mixed schools in this category are few, and there is an eternal competition among the parents to get their children admitted to them. Admission to such a school alone does not guarantee a child's competence in English, he or she has to be given "private" tuition for linguistic and communicative competence and has to be sent to an "elocution" class to pronounce the words in a style locally appreciated as aristocratic. The average schools do not have any emphasis on the nitty-gritty of what the parents, teachers, and children of these popular schools bother about. Those children do not receive any attention in their efforts to master the language. However, the national media and the educational authorities talk about a vast progress achieved in the teaching and learning of English in post-colonial Sri Lanka.

This dissertation uses the theories of posthumanism, cyborg feminism, Deleuzian concepts of the body and the monstrous. Through these ideas, I argue for a reconceptualisation of women’s bodies alongside technology. This reconceptualisation and reconfiguration opposes the boundaries and dualisms imposed on women’s bodies. I do this by mapping out the rational humanism associated with the Enlightenment. I argue for new lines of flight to be explored, while examining the potentially transgressive forms of bodily transformation and metamorphosis. This exploration includes the analysis of two opposing yet complementary case-studies: the avant-garde French performance artist ORLAN, and the cosmetic surgery reality television (CSRTV) show Botched. I explore their overlapping discourses of self-transformation and their respective disregard for the sacrosanctity of the ‘natural’ body and flesh. Where they differ, is in their modes of obtaining self-transformation, and the politics that underlie their intentions

This paper applies a feminist post-structural discourse analysis to an excerpt from the DVD release Girls Gone Wild: Finally 18, vol 3 (2007) in order to investigate themes of language and gender, making salient themes of power, normativity, performativity, objectification, infantilization, humor, laughter, and self-disclosure. The study finds that both interlocutors in the scene - interviewer and interviewee - employ gendered language performances for different purposes in accordance with relevant discourses. Notably, the interviewer uses language strategies that masks his superior power.

This article proposes an interpretation of the horror body as a historical prolongation of Bakhtinian grotesque. I pretend to demonstrate the relevance of the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin in order to study current manifestations where a material bodily principle collaborates with the description of periods of cultural mutations. In the historical transition from cinema to current TV series, the grotesque of body horror surfaces a bodily awareness that reveals our biological and cultural fears, many of which are linked to certain postmodern transformations.

ConFest (Conference/Festival) is an alternative lifestyle festival hosted by the Down to
Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). Born in 1976, ConFest has become a principal site for
the celebration of Australia’s alternative movement - the country’s marginal centre. A
permissive enclave for exploring, exchanging and contesting diverse alternate discourse
and practice, this vast counterscape represents an organic catalyst for the multidimensional
(re)production and suffusion of alternative culture.
With the purpose of devising an apposite rendering of ConFest, a five year multi-modal
research commitment has demanded re-evaluation of the most influential paradigm in the
study of alternative lifestyle events - that of Victor Turner. The thesis undertakes a
twofold deconstruction of the Turnerian paradigm.
First, I identify Turner’s archetypal liminal modalities (play, drama, and community)
demonstrating how each, through their unique on-site expression, contextualise the
performance and realisation of various qualities of authenticity. I provide special attention
to ferality, a local eco-radical career accessed and performed at ConFest. Second, I
respond critically to Turner’s essentialist legacy (the homogeneity and non-carnality of
actors) through an exploration of ConFest’s identifiable heterogeneity and corporeality.
Specifically, I regard ConFest as: (a) an alternative cultural heterotopia, a hyper matrix of
performance zones occupied by variously complementary and competing de-centrist neotribes,
and; (b) a pleasurescape of performative carnality, a realm of the liminal body.
Therefore, via a detailed investigation of a contested and sensuous counter-community, I
reconfigure Turner to provide an appropriately post-structuralist heuristic of public events.
Drawing upon extensive research data and the hitherto unexplored connections between
various strands of contemporary writing, this is an ethnography on authenticity performed
and realised at an organic hyper-liminal centre on the edge of Australian culture.

Ancora più importante è il motivo della maschera. È il motivo più complesso e più ricco di significato della cultura popolare. La maschera è legata alla gioia degli avvicendamenti e delle reincarnazioni, alla relatività gaia, alla negazione gioiosa dell'identità e del significato unico, alla negazione della stupida coincidenza con se stessi; la maschera è legata agli spostamenti, alle metamorfosi, alle violazioni delle barriere naturali, alla ridicolizzazione, ai nomignoli (accompagnati dai nomi); in essa è incarnato il principio giocoso della vita; alla sua base sta il rapporto del tutto particolare della realtà e dell'immagine, caratteristico di tutte le forme più antiche di riti e spettacoli. È senz'altro impossibile esaurire il simbolismo estremamente complicato e polisemico della maschera. Bisogna notare comunque che fenomeni come la parodia, la caricatura, le smorfie, le smancerie, le scimmiottature, ecc., non sono altro, in fondo, che suoi derivati. È nella maschera che si rivela molto chiaramente l'essenza del grottesco 1 .

The American Gothic powerfully influenced Ray Bradbury’s writing, and a midwestern carnival inspired him to become a writer. Bradbury’s favorite work of fiction,  and the one that best exemplifies both the Gothic and the carnivalesque qualities of his imagination, is Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), which tells the story of how the boys Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, together with Will’s father Charles, confront and defeat Cooger and Dark’s evil carnival. Contrary to scholarly consensus, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a distinctively constructed allegory that represents and critiques American Cold War paranoia in a quintessentially Gothic and carnivalesque fashion, by illustrating how laughter conquers fear. In it, the Gothic and the carnivalesque work together to explore related historical and psychological phenomena.

This thesis examines the contemporary interplay between satire and politics, focusing on texts that envisage and engage with politics in unconventional and often mischievous ways. There is a long tradition of scholarship concerned with issues such as satire’s ability to promote subversion, awareness, apathy or even cynicism; the potential, or lack thereof, of satire to influence any change in political or journalistic discourse; and the relationship between satire and “truth,” particularly in satire’s capacity to “speak truth to power.” My research expands on this tradition, asking, how does televisual and online political satire contribute to shifting political discourses? Focusing primarily on the under-researched relationship between satire and Australian politics, this question is considered through textual and discursive analysis. Firstly, I examine the difference between cynicism and its ancient counterpart kynicism in order to illustrate how different types of satire approach the idea of truth and truth-telling. I then explore how the larrikin, the carnivalesque and a cultural “distaste for taste” play an important role in the way satirists are given legitimacy to speak on political issues in Australia. My research observes that in the current media landscape, satirists and politicians are encroaching on each other’s spaces. The satirist is given a licence to speak both satirically and seriously about politics, and the politician attempts to gain cultural capital through playing with the satirist in good humour, sometimes actively satirising themselves. This direct interplay between satire and politics has contributed to three significant shifts within political discourse: certain satires are now being used as trusted, legitimate sources of political information and truth; politicians increasingly engage with satirists or use satire in ways that suggest a political attempt at co-option; and those who I define as “citizen satirists” are engaging in practices of consumption and production resulting in online satirical texts that have, due to the global flow of information, started to contribute to political debates in more traditional mainstream media.

The Forest of Dean is often regarded as a little country on its own, a borderland between England and Wales, almost an island between the rivers Severn and Wye. Appropriately, the Country - a synonym for local commonwealth - was the term inhabitants of this land between two rivers used to identify themselves. They shared grievances caused by woodland and key resources, such as iron ore and coal, being monopolised by royal favourites.
In this liminal place, a carnivalesque riot mixing festivities with demolition of enclosures reportedly involving thousands of people began on Lady Day 1631 and continued, on and off, for more than a year. Skimmington, usually recorded as a mocking shame punishment visited on cuckolds and husband-beaters, was here used to invert hierarchy in other ways. It was used in a pejorative sense to symbolically bury the notorious "odious projector" Sir Giles Mompesson in one of his coal pits, and then used triumphantly, as a poor man, John Williams, took on the role of a riot captain, or lord of misrule.
While the Skimmington Riots in the Forest of Dean have been bracketed in with various studies - whether of skimmington itself, the historiographical construct the Western Rising, and the centuries-long struggle by miners and commoners to retain their customary privileges - this is the first time the riots have been a singular focus of a study that is led by primary sources.
These events are considered in various contexts, as a means of investigating the workings of early modern society, and the research project contributes to a debate within recent historiography by arguing that social relations were more complex than hegemonic or binary models allow.