Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond

Peeren’s book brings the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to bear on contemporary expressions of popular culture, including the novel and television series Sex and the City, the television series Queer as Folk, the films Nell and Flawless, and London’s annual Notting Hill Carnival. This selection of artifacts and events is designed to show the continuing relevance of Bakhtin’s ideas for present-day literary and cultural studies and to theorize the construction and political assertion of gender, racial, and sexual identities as fundamentally intersubjective. With Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture, Peeren models a new approach to Bakhtin that moves away from the study of Bakhtin’s sources and historical context in order to situate him in relation to present-day debates about identity and agency. By working through various concepts-the chronotope, performativity, the look and the gaze, the cultural addressee, accents and speech genres, translation, and territory and versioning-she demonstrates how Bakhtin’s ideas are tested, transformed, and extended by their interaction with specific instances of popular culture and with the other theoretical frameworks those instances invoke.