Unbending Bakhtin’s Carnivalisation and the Related Approaches in Othello

Abstract

In the present article, the researchers have demonstrated a textual analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello using Bakhtin’s concept of Carnivalisation and its related approaches as tools of analysis. Passage of the time has approved that Shakespeare’s tragedies still live out of time and place, because they are the repository of humanity. Therefore, his works can aptly be interpreted to gain new meanings in various societies with different cultures, and this can ultimately produce the polyphonic clash of struggles in his works. Consequently as these struggles become the subjects of the same society they resist against the dominant culture, or the dominant hierarchies, then it produces the second culture which is called carnival in the Bakhtinian canon. Considering such a hypothesis in mind, this study is to find the traces of Bakhtin’s famous term carnivalisation and the related approaches in Shakespeare's Othello, the findings show that Shakespeare’s Othello offers some hidden and dynamic repository of Bakhtin’s views of poliphonism and carnival, it also foregrounds the idea of power-craving in a handy-dandy world.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n3p433