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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 11, Chapter 3 - Popular - Festive Forms.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Bakhtin assert is evident in Rabelais' use of games that combine play and prophecy?
(a) A ponderous, scholarly approach to the study of history.
(b) A highly spiritual notion of the relevance of human history.
(c) A disregard for the importance of historical figures.
(d) A carnivalesque conception of the historical process.

2. Bakhtin asserts that beatings, death, feasting, and merrymaking are all integral parts of:
(a) The Renaissance notion that all which is already established is perfect.
(b) The Renaissance system of images that is perpetually regenerative and never decaying.
(c) Rabelais' view of the proper treatment of foreigners and peasants.
(d) The methods of marketplace vendors in overpricing their goods.

3. How is a "prophetic riddle" game carnivalesque in nature?
(a) It focuses on gaiety and humor.
(b) It stresses the importance of feasting and drinking.
(c) It stresses the destruction of the established order and hierarchy of society.
(d) It is always sung in a rhymed singsong tone.

4. How is the Rabelaisian use of tripe an excellent example of grotesque realism?
(a) It is the epitome of disgusting.
(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 a drug which offers the user a glimpse of a higher plane of existence.

5. What does Rabelais parody in his response to the episode of Gargantua's birth?
(a) The Renaissance philosophy of humanism.
(b) The Medieval doctrine of faith.
(c) The Christian doctrine of submission.
(d) The Classical philosophy of stoicism.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. In Rabelais' works, some causes of diseases associated with the material body lower stratum are:

3. What does Bakhtin find to be the greatest error other critics make in their studies of Rabelais' works?

4. What does Panurge fear if he gets married?

5. What was the most prevalent medium of the culture of the common folk in the Renaissance?

(see the answer key)

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