Abstract

In his article “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism” , Wayne Booth develops an argument for “ethical” literary criticism, criticism that is concerned with the ideologies inherent in works of literature and the effects these ideologies may have on the reader. Or, as he phrases it himself: “What we are talking about [is] human ideals, how they are created in art and thus implanted in readers and left uncriticized” . Booth’s starting point, his “inspiration” for this argument, is Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” and, in particular, Bakhtin’s use of this notion in his interpretation of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel narratives.1 For those not familiar with Booth’s essay , I will briefly summarize his argument in support of ethical criticism.Booth begins with much praise for Bakhtin because Bakhtin seems to have discovered in Rabelais a linguistic technic that frees the reader from the ideologies inherent in language . As Booth paraphrases Bakhtin, any writer who employs the languages of different ideologies within one text freed the reader from the “prison-house of language” to the extent that he allows the reader to view each ideology from the outside, from these other languages, so that this reader can judge each ideology in terms other than those which the ideology builds into its own language. 1. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky . Richard M. Berrong is visiting assistant professor of French at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Every Man for Himself: Social Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais and Rabelair and Bakhtin Revisited: The Presence and Exclusion of Popular Culture in “Gargantua and Pantagruel”