This sounds suspiciously like the internet. That cannot be anything but a coincidence, considering Rabelais and His World was written and translated before the internet existed. Bakhtin’s popularity during the 1980s (a time in history I choose to believe did not actually occur - mostly because Ronald Reagan cannot possibly have been a real person) also happened (or did not happen - who knows?!) before the internet had evolved into its current incarnation. While Bakhtin wrote in the 20th century about novels of the 16th, the marketplace freedom of the medieval carnival has sought new venues ever since that form of carnival disappeared. Temporary instances of this freedom in very limited places have popped up, but the internet is the first to match the huge span of carnival in taking over the lives of entire towns for months. The internet is the internet, and rules all our lives until the ever-approaching apocalypse. The anonymity of the internet (excluding Google, Facebook, and iProduct log-ins) suspends the usual hierarchies. Children can Tweet at celebrities, there are so many more opportunities for hate speech, and people with no qualifications or experience (also, people with too much experience with respectable jobs) can write for strange web magazines. This suspension of hierarchies is how a VP at Goldman Sachs ended up writing about sports for money somewhere on the internet.1 The rest of the quote about “special forms of marketplace speech” is also true in somewhat different ways on the internet. There are some emoticons that only twelve year-olds understand. This may not be liberating. Internet language is real and scary, and though definitely divided into many subcultures, none of these groups coincide exactly with real life subcultures. There is also a greater degree of freedom in crossing into a different subculture, although not complete freedom - most of the twelve year-olds will eventually out themselves.
	With the internet creating a new type of carnival, carnivalesque literature in the twenty-first century likely draws on new traditions alongside the old history of folk humor (which never entirely disappears). An interesting note on medieval clowns in Rabelais and His World also draws the connection between internet writing and official literature. 
 In much the same way, writers from the internet remain internet people, with the internet language and internet culture they picked up from the carnivalesque nature of the internet. They do not reject that culture the second they get book deals. They are both “real and ideal”: they publish books, affirming that they truly exist in the world, but they also maintain their ideal image of people messing around on the internet. Sam Lipsyte is such a modern day version of the medieval clown, even though he doesn’t mess around on the internet much anymore. He used to, back when the internet barely existed, in 1999.
	I choose to focus on Sam Lipsyte because he makes me laugh. 
And what more to fear than producing a less than stellar capstone paper at the culmination of my career as an English major?2 Sam Lipsyte writes about failure, so he really speaks to the people of the internet, most of whom are hiding/procrastinating away from the real world.
