The Russian critic whose study of Rabelais, in Bob's dialogue 24 account, retrieved the word "Menippean" and restored it over Dryden's "Varronian." Bakhtin is the pivot between the older Roman naming and the term's modern life: his work fed Kristeva's Desire in Language, which popularized Menippean satire in late-twentieth-century criticism — the channel through which the label reached the readers who would later find it, surprisingly, already in McLuhan.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the reviver — the Russian critic whose Rabelais study retrieves "Menippean" from Dryden's "Varronian" and hands it to Kristeva
Bakhtin is the reviver — his Rabelais criticism pulled "Menippean" back out of the Varronian centuries and made it the term the form would carry into modern criticism.
"he wrote on Rabelais and he retrieved the word Menippean satire."
Connections
Bakhtin's work on Rabelais retrieved the word "Menippean," displacing Dryden's "Varronian."
Kristeva's Desire in Language responds to Bakhtin and carries the term into late-1960s criticism.