Carnivals and Commonplaces

The world of the Hollywood film has been thoroughly landscaped with familiar locales - from sitting rooms and staircases to castles, roads, small towns, and river idylls. In this book, Michael V. Montgomery invokes Bakhtin's work on the chronotope to demonstrate that some Hollywood locales have surprisingly ancient progenitors. He considers the hermeneutic functions of recognizable chronotopes in the film text and the central importance of the idyllic chronotope for political commentary. Dr. Montgomery also branches out from Bakhtin's discussion to consider recent locales that appear to be candidates for chronotopes: the picaresque highway of the 1960s, the troubled New York of the 1970s, and the shopping mall of the 1980s.