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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, Intro. cont. & Chapter 1 - Rabelais in the History of Laughter.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Why did Bakhtin feel his times were comparable to those of the Renaissance?
(a) Two political leaders of the different eras were incredibly alike.
(b) Both eras were times of broad social change that left people unsure of how to proceed.
(c) The literatures and cultures of both eras bore a distinct resemblance.
(d) The specific threat of disease was killing many people in both times.

2. Bakhtin connects Medieval "seriousness" most closely to:
(a) Fear, weakness, and violence.
(b) Inspiration and hope.
(c) Feasting, spectacles, and sex.
(d) Scholarly activities.

3. Bakhtin believes that novels are:
(a) Inherently confessional.
(b) Socially charged and polemical.
(c) Random, like stream-of-consciousness.
(d) Utterly separate from the author's own life.

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

5. What do some critics argue has been absent from Russian literature?
(a) A particularly Western type of humor.
(b) Religious fervor.
(c) Political dissent.
(d) Sexually-charged dialogue.

Short Answer Questions

1. When did the Russian Revolution occur?

2. How, according to Bakhtin, does the current Russian literary criticism approach Rabelais' works?

3. According to Bakhtin's semiotic understanding, what irony is inherent within the creative power of language?

4. With what is "folk culture" most concerned?

5. In which twentieth-century movement was the grotesque especially evident?

(see the answer key)

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