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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. What is a "marketplace spectacle"?
(a) Specifically the public whipping of a criminal in the center of the marketplace.
(b) The mundane goings-on of a typical French Renaissance marketplace.
(c) A theatrical production arranged atop a platform in the center of the marketplace.
(d) A series of booths dedicated solely to bilking customers out of their money.

3. What are the "Catchpoles" of which Rabelais writes?
(a) Vegetables which require being strung to a pole in order to grow.
(b) People who earn money by allowing others to beat them.
(c) Animals sent into the wild as sacrifices.
(d) Materials used to build large meeting-houses.

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

5. In Rabelais' time, the word "drum" and the act of drumming connoted:
(a) Death.
(b) Nature.
(c) Sexuality.
(d) Spiritual awakening.

6. What does young Gargantua study in order to become acquainted with the common folk?
(a) The way young people are educated.
(b) Physically demanding activities.
(c) Interactions between men and women.
(d) Herbs and medicines.

7. The figure of the Physician in the Fourth Book is closely connected with:
(a) Death and birth.
(b) Thought and spirit.
(c) Alchemy.
(d) Heresy.

8. The purpose of "travesty" in folk festivals was to:
(a) Reassert traditional definitions of social and spiritual life.
(b) Indicate the importance of travel to an individual's self-development.
(c) Irreversibly denigrate everything it could.
(d) Call upon something serious and make it amusing.

9. The core images of the prologue of _Gargantua_ are:
(a) Scenes of travel and journeys.
(b) Scenes of violence.
(c) Scenes of pious worship.
(d) Scenes of eating and drinking.

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

11. To what does Bakhtin compare the various cries of Paris?
(a) A roaring storm.
(b) A crowded kitchen.
(c) A sobbing child.
(d) A howling wolf.

12. With what is "folk culture" most concerned?
(a) Commerce and industry.
(b) The affairs of royalty.
(c) Foreign songs, art, and stories.
(d) The lives of ordinary people.

13. What work of literature is parodied in the prologue of _Gargantua_?
(a) Dante's _Divine Comedy_
(b) Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_
(c) Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_
(d) Plato's _Symposium_

14. In which twentieth-century movement was the grotesque especially evident?
(a) Futurism.
(b) Impressionism.
(c) Modernism.
(d) Expressionism.

15. The vocabulary of the prologue of _Gargantua_ is:
(a) Objective and editorially distant.
(b) Quietly reflective and speculative.
(c) Loaded with comparatives and superlatives.
(d) Purely abusive and vulgar.

Short Answer Questions

1. Bakhtin asserts that beatings, death, feasting, and merrymaking are all integral parts of:

2. How does Bakhtin interpret the relevance of the cries of Paris to Renaissance France?

3. In the folklore and grotesque realism of Rabelais' works, excrement represents bodies and matter that are:

4. According to Bakhtin, what is directly related to the oversized foods common at Renaissance feasts?

5. Comic rituals in Medieval and Renaissance Europe were:

(see the answer keys)

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