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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. Bakhtin thinks that life is:
(a) Organized by human acts of behavior and cognition.
(b) Inert, chaotic, and requiring the intervention of art.
(c) A sacrifice the soul makes to the body.
(d) Meaningless and futile.

2. In the folklore and grotesque realism of Rabelais' works, excrement represents bodies and matter that are:
(a) Frightening and terrible.
(b) Mostly comic.
(c) Generally revered.
(d) One with the earth.

3. What are examples of carnivalesque victims?
(a) Blushing virgins and old maids.
(b) Peasants and tax collectors.
(c) Debased clowns and slaughtered oxen.
(d) Stray dogs and street orphans.

4. How did Rabelais obtain the material for his writings?
(a) By receiving a divine revelation.
(b) By interviewing thousands of market vendors.
(c) By studying manuscripts for long hours in monasteries.
(d) By attending many fairs and festivals and observing all the people there.

5. How does Rabelais accomplish the grotesque degradation of his target in the prologue to the Third Book?
(a) By insulting the targets' mothers.
(b) By accusing the targets of paganism and crimes against the Church.
(c) By declaring the targets to be empty-headed.
(d) By declaring the targets incapable of the basest bodily functions.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does the prologue of _Pantagruel_ demonstrate the connection between literature and the marketplace?

2. Why does Bakhtin cite Goethe as a source about the nature of Carnival?

3. What work of literature is parodied in the prologue of _Gargantua_?

4. What is the theme of "cuckoldry"?

5. What does Bakhtin argue is the role of dialogue?

(see the answer key)

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