Insuspected links between carnival and dialogism

Abstract

Instead of attempting to interpret Bakhtin's carnival and his theories of dialogism as if they represented two independent strains of thought in his writings, this article proposes to see the two as being intimately linked with one another. For this discussion, we present several major interpretations of Bakhtin's carnival, as they appear in several languages, and we attempt to show the hidden dialogic moments of these same interpretations. Likewise, we use theories of utterance to explore several hitherto unsuspected links between the carnival and dialogism.