Bakhtin versus the Atkins Diet

My wife is reading Rabelais' classic work Gargantua. Wonderful book, relevant to Gulliver's Travels, Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and....er....who is that literary critic? Argh! Thus ensued my attempt to recall the Russian literary critic Bakhtin. Making a long story short, I found the Bakhtin Center. Of course, what good is a study of Bakhtin without context, so I was happy to find the site associated with a course on the aesthetics of the grotesque. Perhaps when I find time I can brush up on this literary foe of the Atkins diet.