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Kang, Junsoo. “Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved with Carnivalism.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 41.3 (2015): 1-22. This paper examines the identity and life of black people through in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Beloved has elements of excessive violence, anti-authority, and festival. These are a definite tendency of carnivalism, which Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin theorized. The characteristics of carnivalism contain four categories of the carnival sense of the world. First, familiarization is linked with the concept of the carnival square where people who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact. Second, eccentricity permits the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves. Third, mesalliance is a free and familiar attitude spreads over all values and thoughts. Fourth, profanation which means carnivalistic blasphemies is linked with carnivalistic parodies on sacred things. The focus of this paper is abnormal human images, character's grotesqueness and ambivalence of language. To represent carnivalism, Beloved reflects the fantastic and supernatural elements. The elements of carnivalism in Beloved are based on magical, surreal, and symbolic aspects that blur the boundaries between life and death. Carnival is a reality emancipation method which tends to get over the suffer of life. That is, it can be interpreted to express internal desire to be liberated from social oppression and heaviness in the limited space-time including 'eternity,' 'immovability,' 'absoluteness,' and 'invariability.' Like carnival where characters emancipate themselves from white-centered society and then enjoy changes and freedom. Carnivalism is a literary reappearance of life as a 'post-central thought' based on the negative side of reality. Additionally, the spirit of carnival is to enjoy the amusement elements of life and is an active method to confront life in literature. By sharing their stories through the elements of carnivalism, black people achieve the power to endure and resist white peoples' suppression. (Anyang University)