ABSTRACT
BAKHTIN’S study of Rabelais would seem fully to exemplify what a Marxist-that is, a historical and materialist-approach to the study of literary texts should look like. Remarkably free from the concerns of traditional aesthetics, it explains the distinguishing formal features of Rabelais’ work not as the manifestation of some invariant set of uniquely distinguishing aesthetic properties but as the product of a particular, historically and materially constrained practice of writing. Further-more, this ‘materialism of production’ is counterbalanced by a‘materialism of consumption’ in the equally concrete and historically specific analysis Bakhtin offers of the different ways in which Rabelais’ work has functioned and been recuperated within different ideological and political conjunctures. The question of a particular text’s political effects, this suggests, cannot be resolved with reference to its formal properties, treated as an ahistorical abstraction, but requires an examination of the concrete and changing functions which that text fulfils in the real social process.
