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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 7, Chapter 2, Language of the Marketplace Cont..

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Mikhail Bakhtin is:
(a) The most famous Russian writer ever.
(b) A fictional figure created to be the mouthpiece of an anonymous author.
(c) A vocal Eastern Orthodox cleric.
(d) A somewhat mysterious but increasingly interesting literary figure.

2. How does Bakhtin interpret the relevance of the cries of Paris to Renaissance France?
(a) The cries were the people's only method of exchanging ideas.
(b) The cries negate the revitalization of the marketplace.
(c) The cries combine the reality of practical life with festive utopian universalism.
(d) The cries suggest a deep discontent in the Parisian populace.

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

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. In Rabelais' time, why was the meaning of debasement often ambivalent?

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

3. Bakhtin believes that novels are:

4. In Rabelais' time, jurons, or profanities and oaths, were most often concerned with:

5. In the seventeenth century, the decline of laughter as a primary force in folk culture resulted from:

(see the answer key)

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