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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Bakhtin consider the most indispensable element of folk culture?
(a) Fables.
(b) Death rituals.
(c) Carnival.
(d) Marriage.

2. The combination of solemnity and joking in the tone of the Prologue to the Third Book indicates:
(a) The complex explanation of the Prologue to the readers.
(b) The importance and necessity of laughter.
(c) The opinion that humor must be subordinate to seriousness.
(d) The confusion the author experiences with this combination.

3. How does the Lord of Basche contrive to bring Catchpoles to his castle?
(a) By offering people absolution from their sins.
(b) By giving away his possessions.
(c) By celebrating mock weddings.
(d) By celebrating Mass.

4. Why did Renaissance humanists attempt to suppress oaths and profanities?
(a) They viewed such language as predominantly atheistic.
(b) They saw such language as relics of the superstitious Middle Ages.
(c) They felt that if one could not say something nice, one should say nothing at all.
(d) They were shocked to hear the Lord's name taken in vain.

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

6. How are Bakhtin and Rabelais similar?
(a) They both directly challenge the government by running for political office.
(b) They both subvert the social prohibition on laughter, satire, and irony.
(c) They both write mostly novels.
(d) They live in the same country.

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

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

9. Rabelais expresses the debasement of suffering and fear by associating them with:
(a) Defecation.
(b) Sexual intercourse.
(c) Religious fervor.
(d) Hunger.

10. What was the reception of Rabelais' work in the eighteenth century?
(a) His work was viewed as unintelligible and barbaric.
(b) His work was viewed as a revival of Classical writing.
(c) Other writers strove to emulate his style.
(d) Other writers used his topics as a jumping-off point for their own works.

11. What type of work did Rabelais often publish, especially for the fairs?
(a) Religious tracts.
(b) Political treatises.
(c) Biographies of public figures.
(d) Calendars or almanacs.

12. According to Bakhtin's semiotic understanding, what irony is inherent within the creative power of language?
(a) Language does not actually express anything.
(b) No word can actually ever be defined.
(c) The individual expresses him- or herself only through the words of others.
(d) All languages are one.

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

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

15. In Rabelais' works, some causes of diseases associated with the material body lower stratum are:
(a) Divine retribution for one's sins.
(b) Overindulgence in food, drink, and sex.
(c) Results of public punishments for social crimes.
(d) Results of a sickly infancy and childhood.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is Janotus de Bragmardo?

2. How are abusive and praiseful words reflective of grotesque realism?

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

4. Comic rituals in Medieval and Renaissance Europe were:

5. In Rabelais' time, the word "drum" and the act of drumming connoted:

(see the answer keys)

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