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Book 1, Rabelais & His World : Chapter 1, Foreward

• Krystyna Pomorska, the author of the Foreword, notes that Mikhail Bakhtin was unknown in the West when his first book was published in 1968.

• Bakhtin insisted that art is oriented toward communication.

• Bakhtin understood language and semiotics as a system.

• One of Bakhtin's main interests was folk culture, which is integral to his theory of art.
• Michael Holquist, author of the Prologue, sets Bakhtin's work in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

• Holquist defines _Rabelais and His World_ as a guidebook for Bakhtin's own time as well as a study of the historical poetics of the French Renaissance.

• Bakhtin struggled against the confining institution of the Russian Union of Writers.

• Bakhtin's perspectives on Carnival were instrumental to theorists and historians in the West.

Book 1, Rabelais & His World : Chapter 2, Prologue & Introduction

• Rabelais occupies a peculiar place in literary history: essentially he has been...

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