The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

by Peter Stallybrass, Allon White

Book by Stallybrass, Peter, White, Allon

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, Criticism, History

228 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1986

Reviews

[chana levanah · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book essentially details the rise of european bourgeois culture, it's stomping out of carnivals and fairs, and the folly and complex repercussions of doing so.

the carnival embodied a flaunting of the "lower bodily stratum" , ie feasting, drinking, sex, and general indulgence. carnivals and fairs lasting up to two weeks used to take place all over europe. the authors start out by laying out the ways that carnival inverted the standard hierarchy of the time and then go on to detail the bourgeois turning up their noses at it, squashing it out, creating the middle class, and the resulting neuroses that people raised in bourgeois households suffered.

definitely worth reading to this day. some of the cultural occurrences detailed here still take place today in different contexts; just as the bourgeois appropriated carnival symbology for their high literature while denouncing the filthy lower classes and their customs, white people around the world still ravenously appropriate from people of color while condemning them as shiftless, violent, etc., for example.

also, in the last third of the book, there's some nice "picking apart" of Freud's work, ie talking about how he was a misogynist dink who ignored blatant sociopolitical/class rooted mental health problems in his patients in favor of his Oedipus shit while dismissing women's body image/relationship issues as rooted in their inherent vanity.

the moral of the story is, you cannot erase the fact that you shit, that you piss, that many people fuck and possess sexual urges, that many people enjoy intoxicating themselves, that the human body produces odors, and that human beings unite in and enjoy spectacle and celebration.

if you do, you end up with hegemony/fascism and mental illness. too bad we went ahead and tried I guess.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life. I read it at university and it led me to see the world in a completely different light. It introduced me to the work of Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor is still one of my favourite books. It introduced me to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, and therefore allowed me to re-assess the popular culture I loved so much as child, allowing me to see wrestling, Carry On films and fun fairs as potentially transgressive and part of a centuries old tradition (and therefore, to my mind, something positive). It now influences my writing, and the reason I've re-read it this week, is because I thought it would help with a poem I'm writing. It's very difficult to get hold of (I had to order my copy from the USA) and I wish someone would re-publish it!

[17CECO · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine summary of Bahktinian theory of the carnival and its reception. Then, for my concerns, a reading of how writers like Swift & Pope discipline the carnivalesque, removing it or delegitimating its expression in mixed social spaces in the project of creating a specifically tidy bourgeois public sphere. i.e. the public had to be disciplined to pipe down in theaters, to see coffee shops as genteel, productive spaces. Their bourgeois character had to be produced. These public sphere often becomes more about discourse and commentary, excluding waste, bodies, labor, and trembling pleasure.

How has this book aged? I can hear my advisors whispering in my ear that its predictably Foucauldian--delineating how language performs acts of identification, othering, exclusion, etc. Though that fails to articulate exactly where the analysis needs to be re-oriented. For me, that would mean moving beyond a fixation in regard to how privileged locuses of culture are created to following the carnival in its displacement. It doesn't disappear--so where does it go, how does it transform, and why has it remained largely illegible to us? Is the carnival, like the commons, simply fragmented in time and space--specific acts of inversion and travesty showing up in unexpected places? What eighteenth century language acts tried to maintain the place of the carnivalesque in what would become bourgeois spaces? etc.

Read this only partially and as clean-up-- filling in gaps as I revise a dissertation chapter to completion. One that I wish I had read earlier.

[Stephanie Graves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, Inter-Library Loan, for finding me a copy of an out of print text.

[Rhiannon Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

disgust bears the imprint of desire, yes. little micro-history of cafe culture should be attractive to steppenwolf-reading hispters the wolrd over.

[Eric Hines · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading 18th century lit as if it were written 200 years later. Not an altogether unproductive exercise, but fundamentally blinkered.