The identity of the Caribbean as a territory is a veritable bricolage of cultural forms. Since Columbus’ mistaken arrival in the West Indies, these islands have become home to Spanish, French, Dutch, British, African, Indian and Chinese immigrants, alongside its Aboriginal inhabitants. Despite the massive diversity that can be seen in these islands, there exists one common cultural expression that has persisted for the past 200 years throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. This celebration is Carnival. Trinidad is the southernmost island in the archipelago that composes the Caribbean. Carnival is celebrated in many of Trinidad’s towns, the biggest celebration being held in its capital city, Port-of-Spain. This research thesis looks at Carnival in Port-of-Spain as a complex urban entity that ritualistically re-energises and reclaims the city’s streets. Through ecstatic celebration, the festival engenders a strong sense of communitas and collective identity, annually reinventing itself and occupying a liminal space between the Ordinary city of day-to-day living and the Extraordinary city of mythological complexity. As the festival moves through the city along its annual Parade Route, it creates an urban narrative which exists invisibly during the year in the city’s collective memory. Through a combination of descriptive text, scholarly research and experiential mapping, A City with Two Faces outlines the transformative qualities of Carnival in the streets of Port-of-Spain from its largest temporary urban forms to its smallest manifestations in syncretic masquerade archetypes.

This essay discusses the aspects of Carnival in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the opposition between ordinary official life and the Carnival. Peter Burke’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the Carnival are used throughout the analyse of the poem mainly with focus on four different aspects; food, sex, violence and games. The essay also discusses the questioning of rank, which was central to the spirit of the Carnival where all were considered equal.  Gawain is the protagonist who throughout the poem manages to resist the spirit of the Carnival despite being challenged by three different antagonists who in their on ways symbolise the Carnival; the Green knight with aggressive and mocking speech, the Lady of the Castle who acts as the seducer and Lord Bertilak who in his three hunts shows that he embraces the spirit of the Carnival.

This thesis employs the concept of 'voice' in order to explore the variety of dialogic relationships between men and women in seven Shakespeare plays. Here, 'voice' is defined as an ideological position held by a character and voices within a dialogical relationship test dominant social ideas. In doing so, the aim is to explore how employing a linguistic approach allows us to develop a more nuanced perspective towards women and female voices in Shakespeare. Taking the early modern tradition of an all-male-cast into consideration, this project acknowledges the tension between the idea of embodiment and voice; however, it argues that even though there is no biological female body of the Shakespearean stage, there is a female voice. Dialogism, of course, derives from the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. These 'voices' are analysed in the context of a theoretical framework informed by his writings on the novel, which are also increasingly being used to make sense of drama in line with Bakhtin's own awareness of a nascent dialogism in Shakespearean drama. 'Polyphony', in particular, assumes a separation between the author's and the characters' points of view. Thus, this project considers Shakespeare's texts as dialogic and his plays as a dialogue of voices, in which the characters have the capacity to hold dialogical relationships where no voice holds more importance than any other. This is significant because these conflicting voices are what make the Shakespearean text different from those in which a single voice is heard - that of the author, for example. As this study talks about an oppressive authoritative/patriarchal language, a dialogic approach unlocks the languages of the others which it tries to marginalise and silence. The research reveals a complex relationship between space, time and voice. More precisely, the carnivalesque becomes visible in Shakespeare's use of innovative discursive devices, such as 'active parody', 'Menippean dialogue' and 'Socratic dialogue', which suggests a multi-toned and ambiguous female voice; a voice that has the capacity to covertly and overtly oppose and challenge social ideologies surrounding gender. The thesis offers new perspectives on the presentation of women and speech. Importantly, it offers a more sophisticated and complex Bakhtinian framework for looking at carnival in Shakespeare. Additionally, a linguistic model of analysis also develops current scholarly use of Bakhtin's concept of carnival. Rather than viewing carnival as simply a time-space of betwixt and between, this project looks at carnival in the context of language (the carnivalesque). More specifically, it reveals how Shakespeare's female figures find pockets of carnivalesque space in everyday existence through dialogue. Thus, suggesting that emancipation is not limited to an allocated time or space, rather, it can also be achieved through language.

The identity of the Caribbean as a territory is a veritable bricolage of cultural forms. Since Columbus’ mistaken arrival in the West Indies, these islands have become home to Spanish, French, Dutch, British, African, Indian and Chinese immigrants, alongside its Aboriginal inhabitants. Despite the massive diversity that can be seen in these islands, there exists one common cultural expression that has persisted for the past 200 years throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. This celebration is Carnival. Trinidad is the southernmost island in the archipelago that composes the Caribbean. Carnival is celebrated in many of Trinidad’s towns, the biggest celebration being held in its capital city, Port-of-Spain. This research thesis looks at Carnival in Port-of-Spain as a complex urban entity that ritualistically re-energises and reclaims the city’s streets. Through ecstatic celebration, the festival engenders a strong sense of communitas and collective identity, annually reinventing itself and occupying a liminal space between the Ordinary city of day-to-day living and the Extraordinary city of mythological complexity. As the festival moves through the city along its annual Parade Route, it creates an urban narrative which exists invisibly during the year in the city’s collective memory. Through a combination of descriptive text, scholarly research and experiential mapping, A City with Two Faces outlines the transformative qualities of Carnival in the streets of Port-of-Spain from its largest temporary urban forms to its smallest manifestations in syncretic masquerade archetypes.

This thesis tries to circumscribe the carnavalesque narrative strategies that Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974) uses in Mulata de tal (1963) to project his pessimistic vision of the social, cultural and religious mixing in Guatemala. The purpose of our work is to make an interpretation of the novel through the analysis of the carnavalesque elements of the work. To achieve this goal, we base our analysis on the Russian critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin's theories of the literary carnavalization and the dialogical principle, which we describe in the first chapter. In the following chapter we examine the formal and semantic components of the novel. In the third chapter we analyse the contrasting and deformed images that represent the social, cultural and religious mixing. Finally, in the fourth chapter we study the different social languages which the author stylizes or parodies to express his ideas in a refracted manner.

Through four hundred years of accumulated disparaging comments from critics, revenge plays have lost much of the original luster they possessed in early modern England. Surprisingly, scholarship on revenge tragedy has invented an unfavorable lens for understanding this genre, and this lens has been relentlessly parroted for decades. The conventional generic approach that calls for revenge plays to exhibit a recurring set of concerns, including a revenge motive, a hesitation for the protagonist, and the revenger’s feigned or actual madness, imply that these plays lack philosophical depth, as the appellation of revenge tends to evoke the trite commonalities which we have created for the genre. This dissertation aims to rectify the provincial views concerning revenge tragedies by providing a more complex, multivalent critical model that makes contemporary the outmoded approaches to this genre. I argue that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, and the ways in which it engages with new historical interpretations of early modern drama, functions as a discursive methodology to open up more creative interpretative possibilities for revenge tragedy. Carnival readings expose gaps in new historicism’s proposed systems of omnipresent power, which deny at every turn the chance for rebellion and individuality. Rather than relegating carnival to an occasional joke, quick aside, or subplot, revenge plays explore carnivalesque concerns, and revengers plot their vengeance with all the aspects of a carnival. In these plays, revengers define subjectivity in terms of the pleasure-seeking, self-serving urges of unofficial culture; negotiations for social change occur in which folk culture avoids a repressive, hierarchal order; and carnival play destabilizes courtly systems that track, classify, pigeonhole, and immobilize individuals.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-235). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Bibliography: p. 63-66.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2008. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 13, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-39).

Thesis--Stockholm. / English or Russian. Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-166).