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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What common fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary device does Bakhtin identify in the Prologue to the Third Book?
(a) Complaints about love.
(b) Long lists of names and epithets.
(c) Blank verse.
(d) Invocations to the Muse.

2. "Tripe" literally refers to:
(a) A type of songbird.
(b) A type of freshwater fish.
(c) The stomach and bowels of cattle.
(d) The main blood vessel in the brain of a human.

3. What was the reception of Rabelais' work in the eighteenth century?
(a) Other writers strove to emulate his style.
(b) His work was viewed as a revival of Classical writing.
(c) Other writers used his topics as a jumping-off point for their own works.
(d) His work was viewed as unintelligible and barbaric.

4. What does Bakhtin find to be the greatest error other critics make in their studies of Rabelais' works?
(a) They treat Rabelais as a prophet of literary upheavals.
(b) They classify Rabelais as just as important as Shakespeare and Cervantes.
(c) They neglect to explore the element of the Renaissance folk culture.
(d) They read Rabelais' works as allegory only.

5. How are abusive and praiseful words reflective of grotesque realism?
(a) The words are carefully chosen by the speaker to disgust the listener.
(b) The words are spoken in a language the listener cannot understand, so they sound like gibberish.
(c) The words reflect incompatible sides of certain social classes of people.
(d) The words combine two sides of the same form or feeling into an ambivalent but cohesive social structure.

6. Carnival allowed:
(a) The endurance of the propriety expected of all social classes.
(b) The peasants to sell their crops without paying taxes.
(c) The mixing of real and unreal, fantasy and fact.
(d) The upper class to oppress relentlessly the lower class.

7. To what does Veselovsky compare Rabelais?
(a) An ironfisted dictator.
(b) A village boy.
(c) A pious priest.
(d) An elderly scholar.

8. Did the "unofficial" and "official" forms of speech ever coincide?
(a) No, both forms of speech were highly regulated.
(b) Yes, except for religious holidays.
(c) No, except during times of war.
(d) Yes, especially during festivals.

9. What are the "Catchpoles" of which Rabelais writes?
(a) Animals sent into the wild as sacrifices.
(b) Materials used to build large meeting-houses.
(c) Vegetables which require being strung to a pole in order to grow.
(d) People who earn money by allowing others to beat them.

10. What in particular forms the basic elements of Rabelais' novel _Gargantua_?
(a) Predictions of the future.
(b) Historical allusions.
(c) Classical myths.
(d) Autobiographical observations of Rabelais' own life.

11. How is the Rabelaisian use of tripe an excellent example of grotesque realism?
(a) It is a drug which offers the user a glimpse of a higher plane of existence.
(b) It combines fantasy with reality in one type of cuisine.
(c) It merges the positive and negative, or upper and lower, spheres of the body.
(d) It is the epitome of disgusting.

12. With what is "folk culture" most concerned?
(a) The lives of ordinary people.
(b) Commerce and industry.
(c) The affairs of royalty.
(d) Foreign songs, art, and stories.

13. Comic rituals in Medieval and Renaissance Europe were:
(a) Taboo in all settings but the royal court.
(b) Necessary to mercantile transactions.
(c) All that which linked the living to the dead.
(d) Freed of the trappings of religious dogma and mysticism.

14. How is the figure of the king treated in Rabelais' writing?
(a) Like a god: worshipped, feared, and obeyed.
(b) Like a clown: beaten, travestied, and transformed.
(c) Like a child: pampered, sheltered, and beloved.
(d) Like a criminal: charged, tried, and punished.

15. The prologue of _Pantagruel_ is a parody and travesty of:
(a) The ecclesiastical persuasiveness of the Church.
(b) The pomp and circumstance of the aristocracy.
(c) The ignorance of the peasantry.
(d) The fables of ancient Greece.

Short Answer Questions

1. "Friar John" is heavily associated with:

2. What are the "intelligentsia"?

3. Bakhtin believes that novels are:

4. After Rabelais' time, the use of laughter in literature and culture moved in which direction?

5. What event that Rabelais relates does he assert is the origin of the name of the city of Paris?

(see the answer keys)

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