Thursday, June 28, 2007

"Throughout this period, Bakhtin was at work on the doctoral dissertation that was to become Rabelais and His World; and in 1946 he submitted the work for examination. His examiners took offence at its scatology, sexual explicitness, folkloric sentimentalism and scorn for dogma, and he was granted the degree only 12 years later. It was not until the 1960s that his gradual rehabilitation got underway, partly through the good offices of the Formalist scholar Roman Jakobson."