a quote

[dchenes]

"Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it."

(Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel")

Comments

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

I knew you'd get to him sooner or later. Boy does that bring me back. What do you think of him? Of that book? (I've only read scattered excerpts, but I like the one you chose.)

[dchenes.livejournal.com]

When I started reading him, I thought he was full of himself, but he makes some interesting points (and he admits that humor exists, which hasn't come up in any other semiotics reading yet). I just wish the footnotes weren't mostly in German since he talks a lot about German novels. A footnote that says "reference here is to (German author), (German title); also see (German title)" doesn't help me much.

I don't think what I'm reading is a whole book, since it's a photocopy. It's about 30 pages long.