The author, Mikhail Bakhtin, was a Russian theorist in the 1930s and is an often cited scholar in contemporary thought. Bakhtin’s immediate point of departure is François Rabelais, a French writer during the Renaissance. Bakhtin insists that within the scatological writing of Rabelais exist the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humor, as well as the shocking practices of the Renaissance carnival. The immediate goal of Rabelais and His World is to uncover the peculiar language and practices of the carnival environment. Bakhtin is quick to distinguish the carnival culture of old from the holiday culture that exists now. The carnivals that exist today pale in comparison to the unbridled lusting, crazed bingeing, and even physical mutilation that occurred in the carnival environment of days past. The carnival that Rabelais wrote about is quite unlike the modern carnival. In fact, so distinct are they that they share little more then just their common name. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men … and of the prohibitions of usual life." (p15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that was the carnival. The term "carnivalesque" refers to the carnivalizing of normal life. Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often connected within the carnival.

Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque as something that is created when the themes of the carnival twist, mutate, and invert standard themes of societal makeup. Bakhtin made contemporary theory aware of how much popular culture in early modern Europe involved flourishing traditions of carnivalesque that mocked those in authority and parodied official ideas of society, history, destiny, fate, as unalterable. With its masks and monsters and feasts and games and dramas and processions, carnival was many things at once. It was festive pleasure, the world turned topsy-turvy, destruction and creation; it was a theory of time and history and destiny; it was utopia, cosmology, and philosophy. The very pleasures of carnival were at the same time philosophical modes. The extravagant juxtapositions, the grotesque mixing and confrontations of high and low, upper-class and lower-class, spiritual and material, young and old, male and female, daily identity and festive mask, serious conventions and their parodies, gloomy medieval time and joyous utopian visions. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men … and of the prohibitions of usual life." (Bakhtin 1984, p. 15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that is the carnival. Bakhtin sees forms of the carnivalesque emanating beyond the Renaissance carnival into literature, art, and everyday life. The carnival has been forever immortalized in the famed literature of Goethe, the fine arts, and in vernacular that is used today. More broadly, the aesthetic trends of artistic humanism are a reaction against the universal self-image that dominated the carnivalesque. Lastly, one can see vestiges of the carnival in the everyday life of modern times. Bakhtin writes that the formulation of humor took place within the carnival. Indeed the whole idea of bringing life "down to earth" is concept that was a central to the carnival.

Carnivalisation thus "makes it possible to extend the narrow sense of life" (Bakhtin, p. 177), or as Foucault observes, it helps to "extend our participation in the present system" (Foucault, p. 230). The aspiration of carnival is to uncover, undermine - even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have the final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed light upon life, the meanings it harbours, to elucidate potentials; projecting, as it does an alternate conceptualisation of reality. Dialogism is a fundamental aspect of the carnival - a plurality of 'fully valid consciousnesses' (Bakhtin, p. 9), each bringing with them a different point of view, a different way of seeing the world. "Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence' (Bakhtin, p. 252); if dialogism ends, reveals Bakhtin, 'everything ends' (Ibid.). Bakhtin argues that by being outside of a culture can one understand his own culture. This process is 'multiply enriching' (Ibid), it opens new possibilities for each culture, reveals hidden 'potentials' (Ibid.), promotes 'renewal and enrichment' (Bakhtin, p. 271) and creates new potentials, new voices, that may become realisable in a future dialogic interaction. Thus the outsidedness of groups marginalised by a dominant ideology within non-carnival time not only gain a voice during carnival time, but they also say something about the ideology that seeks to silence them. Thus two voices come together in the free and frank communication that carnival permits and, although 'each retains its own unity and open totalitythey are mutually enriched' (Bakhtin, p. 56). Carnival and its accompanying components represent a theory of resistance, a theory of freedom from all domination. "Carnival is the place for working out a new mode of interrelationship between individuals . . . People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar contact on the carnival square" (Bakhtin, p. 123). There is a motivation during carnival time to create a form of human social configuration that 'lies beyond existing social forms' (Bakhtin, p. 280). Thus Bakhtin's carnival theory is not reducible to terms such as anarchic, nor irresponsible, it is, in fact, a diverse tactic, one that may be implemented and sustained wherever there is a dominant regime.

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