Social Constraints Breaking social constraints, Carnival

1
Social Constraints Breaking social constraints,
Carnival
2
Social Constraints

• What is a good child like? Name some of his/her
  characteristics?
• How free are children to do whatever they wish?
• What are some things that children should not do?
• Who makes the rules that children are supposed to
  follow?
• Who decides what is good and bad for a child to
  do?
• How do they make these decisions?

3
Social Constraints

• Rules from parents
• Rules at school
• Religious guidelines
• Peer pressure
• Laws of propriety (socially acceptable behavior)
• Fashion
• language/behavior
• Selfishness/selflessness
• Behavior toward opposite sex

4
Breaking social constraints in literature

• gives a feeling of power when readers identify
  with characters who break the rules.
• challenges the norms and conventions of society
  by testing them.
• provides a site for humor.

5
The Carnival Tradition

• Carnival is a festive season when the normal
  rules of society dont apply. It occurs
  immediately before Lent usually during February
  or March. (Lent is a time on the Christian
  calendar when followers give up eating meat
  and/or give up something they really like in
  order to prepare for the passion of Christ.) It
  typically involves a public celebration or parade
  combining some elements of a circus and public
  street party. People often dress up or masquerade
  during the celebrations.
• Popular Carnivals today
• Carnival at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Mardi Gras in New Orleans. USA
• Carnival in Venice, Italy

6
Carnival Venice
7
Carnival at Rio
8
Mardi Gras
9
Carnival

• Carnival is a time or space in which the normal
  rules of society dont apply.
• Carnivalesque literature highlights this kind of
  atmosphere.
• Nonsense is one way of rejecting the formal rules
  of society. This makes it empowering.
• The grotesque is an aspect of carnival that
  celebrates the physical body and the lower bodily
  functions.

10
Carnival

• Its joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal
  and liberatory celebration, to escape the
  pressures of life.
• Participants may deliberately violate what appear
  to be standards of sense and decency (which are
  really methods of social and imaginative
  control).
• Carnivals can be a means of social control
  because the carnival exists within a certain
  space and time. When it ends, then one more
  willingly follows the rules of society once
  again.
• Carnival can also bring freedom and a sense of
  power because people are able to do what they
  want to do.
• A classic scene of a Renaissance carnival
  appears in the opening chapters of The Hunchback
  of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. Quasimodo, the
  hunchback, becomes the King of Fools and is
  paraded like a hero through the streets.

11
Carnivalesque

• Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin studied
  Renaissance carnivals and used the ideas he found
  to explain much of what happens in contemporary
  society and literature.
• Something is carnivalesque when the themes of the
  carnival twist, mutate, and invert standard
  themes of societal makeup.
• When the standards of society are twisted,
  parodied, and inverted in a playful, crazy kind
  of way in stories, we can often see this as
  carnivalesque.
• In carnivalesque literature, as in a carnival, we
  may see mixing and confrontations of the high and
  low, upper-class and lower-class, spiritual and
  material, young and old, male and female, daily
  identities and festive masks, seriousness and the
  comical.

12
The Adventures of Captain Underpants

• Dav Pilkey

13
Captain Underpants

• Think about these questions as we read.
• Where do you see nonsense? How do you react to
  it?
• Do you like George and Harold? Why or why not?
• Why do you think it has become immensely popular?
• How are the rules of society inverted? (In what
  ways is it carnivalesque?)

14
(No Transcript)
15
(No Transcript)
16
Now answer these questions

• Where do you see nonsense? How do you react to
  it?
• Do you like George and Harold? Why or why not?
• Why do you think it has become immensely popular?
• How are the rules of society inverted? (In what
  ways is it carnivalesque?)