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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 15, Chapter 6 - Images of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In Rabelais' novel, the "ancestral body" to which Bakhtin refers means:
(a) The record of births and deaths kept by local churches.
(b) The features of one's body in which one resembles one's parents.
(c) The generative organs which produce children.
(d) The portions of the body that die over time, like hair and fingernails.

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

3. Which answer best describes "grotesque realism"?
(a) The bodily element is universal, celebratory, positive, and exaggerated.
(b) The tone of the writing is always dark, Gothic, and depressing.
(c) The author's focus must be on bodily gore, blood, death, and dying.
(d) The writing must strive to be as mathematically or geometrically accurate as possible in its descriptions.

4. With what portion of the body is grotesque debasement most concerned?
(a) The head and eyes.
(b) The arms and legs.
(c) The spiritual interior essence.
(d) The material lower stratum.

5. What does Bakhtin consider the most indispensable element of folk culture?
(a) Fables.
(b) Carnival.
(c) Marriage.
(d) Death rituals.

Short Answer Questions

1. What do oaths and curses have in common with town announcements and the calls of vendors?

2. Bakhtin believes that novels are:

3. In the Prologue of the Third Book, to which contemporary events does Rabelais allude?

4. When the grotesque was revived in the Romantic era, what did it react against?

5. What does Bakhtin consider the "symposium" of Medieval grotesque realism?

(see the answer key)

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