Bakhtin argues that the essential significance of Rabelais' works is to be found in the author's use of popular culture.

Basing his contentions upon the findings of distinguished historians and scholars of popular culture such as Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Robert Muchambled, Berrong demonstrates the historical weaknesses of Bakhtin's analysis and, therefore, his erroneous reading of Rabelais' fictional narratives.

Its provocative title seems indeed to promise fresh insights on the Russian critic's Rabelais and His World, a well known work which has, since its publication in the late 1960s, often been a subject of controversy. Richard Berrong's well documented monograph, Rabelais and Bakhtin, will not go unnoticed by sixteenth-century literature scholars. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel. HANNA SCHUSTER FIELDS University of Texas at Austin RICHARD M. The study includes an index and notes with extensive documentation all quotations from texts are in English. This is an absorbing book and valuable for graduate students and instructors of German literature and cultural studies. The modernist project has been unable to achieve its goal, but it has articulated the critique of conditions that have to be overcome this constitutes the continued relevance of this literature. Berman concludes that the political power of literature is insufficient to transform society alone. While the emphasis of fascist and epic leftist modernism is on the establishment of charismatic communities, Thomas Mann is concerned with a new social individuality as well as a renewed collective, with the contradictions within the individual representing the social totality. Berman suggests that the use of dialect and inclusion of the proletarian city in leftist modernism represents a radical social change comparable to the integration of the bourgeois family into the tragedies of the eighteenth century. It is significant that both Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Graf's characters fail as individuals.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ħ8Rocky Mountain Review the collective and produce the charismatic community of the emancipated people.

Bakhtin rabelais