Bakhtin's Contributions to the Theory of Western Comic Aesthetics

There is much thought on comic aesthetics in Bakhtin's theory of carnivalesque and his study of Rabelais. How should we assess Bakhtin's theoretical contributions from the perspective of comic aesthetics? This is still the question that hasn't as yet been fully discussed. This thesis is trying to shed some light on this question. The thesis thinks that Bakhtin is dialectical in his thought about laughter and the nature of comedy, which is different from the conventional western comic aesthetics that laid too much emphasis on ethics and the negative contents. Moreover, Bakhtin also had some new ideas in his analysis on the aesthetic categories, e.g. absurdity, satire, etc.