Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the "translinguistic" critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism, the question of language difference in the cinema, issues of national culture in Latin America, and "the carnivalesque" in literature and film. He discusses literary works by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Jarry and treats films by Vigo, Bunuel, Wertmuller, Imamura, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Marleen Gooris, and others. Now in paperback, Subversive Pleasures is a splendidly lucid introduction to the central concepts and analytical methods of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Translinguistics and Semiotics
Chapter 2. Language, Difference, and Power
Chapter 3. Film, Literature, and the Carnivalesque
Chapter 4. Of Cannibals and Carnivals
Chapter 5. The Grotesque Body and Cinematic Eroticism
Chapter 6. From Dialogism to Zelig
Envoi: Bakhtin and Mass-Media Critique
Notes
Index