Bakhtin's “Carnival and Carnivalesque” notes that the carnival is not a performance, and does not make any difference between the spectators from the performer. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things.

It creates inverse cases and breaks down conventions. It is a type of communal performance, with no limit between performers and audience. It is often marked by displays of grotesqueness. It exists on the “borderline of life and art”. Carnival, however, is when everything (except violence) is allowed. Typically, the carnival is when the public participate in a sort of public gatherings. By definition, according to Bakhtin, it is the period of public gala that happens annually. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher who wrote on a variety of subjects, including his famous work Rabelais and his World, on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, where he discusses carnivalesque and Carnival. Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.

For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially the world of carnival, as depicted in the novels of François Rabelais.

Bakhtin rabelais