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Absztrakt
Using Bakhtin, Judith Butler, Mary Russo, Stallybrass and White, and others, in combination with various anthropological studies of liminality and carnival, the dissertation theorizes the uses of laughter, irony, and the grotesque in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Adele Wiseman, Margaret Laurence, Julia Alvarez, and Louise Erdrich, expanding the concept of carnival as a tool for feminist writers and readers.
The texts I explicate in the following chapters work as sites of literary carnival to rewrite patriarchal hegemony. They invert, subvert, and attempt to revise patriarchal "wisdom" through a literary use of carnival. Carnival is intensely political, aiming always to criticize, and often to overthrow, the status quo. However, carnival is also always a personal, participatory event, empowering those who join in its ruckus. In the chapters that follow I attempt to tease out the ways in which the five authors I have chosen to study empower their feminist readers with their strong, rebellious sense of humor.
Carnival humor works subversively through serious play with language, and through serious play with the images of the female body. The five novelists I have studied "question authority" through their texts, highlighting the absurdities of the "authorities" by demonstrating the twisted double-think women must utilize to "be" and to be "real" women, and through a determined foregrounding and undercutting of the masquerade of femininity, the mask of the feminine that women wear in order to hold a place in a patriarchal society.
