Hello all,
I am new to this forum, so if I do something which is against convention, please tell me.
I am currently preparing an enquiry which covers quite a big field. I'm not fully sure where to put this question/these questions. What my enquiry contains is yet a little vague, but I will attempt to explain it.
My enquiry will be about hierarchy and the change of it in the sixties. I want to use Bakhtin's study about Rabelais's Gargantua & Pantagruel. He explains social revolutions by comparing it to carnival, which is a "controled uncontroledness", during carnival the local village idiot can be the king, so the hierarchy changes, but it is planned that this change finds place, and after a certain period everything goes back to normal, and the idiot is idiot again. One could say the sixties started as kind of carnival, a planned change of hierarchies for example, but it is unclear whether it ever stopped or not. So want I'd like to write about is the legacy of the sixties, and (quite important) how it manifests in literature, since my professional realm is literature.
(I hope the above written indicates, despite all the vagueness, what my subject will be. I'm sorry for eventual vagueness which may be caused by language as well - I am Dutch, not British, American or Australian, or from another country where English is the native language).
Now my questions are:
*Which other theories (it can be any field, history, sociology, philosophy, literary sciences, political sciences) treat this topic/these topics?
*What literature would you suggest to use? (I was thinking, mainly, about Thomas Pynchon, but I want to have as many suggestions as possible from all sides)
Thanks in regard, and any critical note or other suggestion is welcome, of course,
Paul-Michel Novo