Subversive Pleasures

Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film mass-media and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range Robert Stam explores issues that include the translinguistic critique of Saussurean semiotics and Russian formalism the question of language difference in the cinema issues of national culture in Latin America and the carnivalesque in literature and film. He discusses literary works by Rabelais Shakespeare and Jarry and treats films by Vigo Bunuel Wertmuller Imamura Mel Brooks Monty Python Marleen Gooris and others. Now in paperback Subversive Pleasures is a splendidly lucid introduction to the central concepts and analytical methods of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.