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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How is the figure of the king treated in Rabelais' writing?
(a) Like a clown: beaten, travestied, and transformed.
(b) Like a criminal: charged, tried, and punished.
(c) Like a child: pampered, sheltered, and beloved.
(d) Like a god: worshipped, feared, and obeyed.

2. Did the "unofficial" and "official" forms of speech ever coincide?
(a) Yes, except for religious holidays.
(b) No, both forms of speech were highly regulated.
(c) No, except during times of war.
(d) Yes, especially during festivals.

3. In Rabelais' time, why was the meaning of debasement often ambivalent?
(a) Because the person saying the insult never means it seriously.
(b) Because the debased person may choose to deflect the debasement.
(c) Because the decaying or excretory organs are closely located to the regenerative genital organs.
(d) Because the head is quite separate from all the other parts of the body, spiritually and materially.

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

5. In the Renaissance, bodily excretions were closely associated with:
(a) The individual's sexual purity.
(b) The inherent evilness or goodness of the individual.
(c) The social status of the individual.
(d) The overall health of the individual.

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

7. How does Bakhtin define the novel?
(a) As a work of pure imagination.
(b) As a single-voiced text.
(c) As a multiplicity of styles.
(d) As a worthless type of literature.

8. What are the "intelligentsia"?
(a) A group of exclusively male scholars.
(b) The bits of knowledge all people accumulate over their lifetimes.
(c) An elite spy organization.
(d) A group which provides an interpretation of the world.

9. In the seventeenth century, the decline of laughter as a primary force in folk culture resulted from:
(a) An increasingly "official" culture of rationalism.
(b) The need of the public for other forms of diversion.
(c) The exhaustion of any new sources of humor.
(d) The declining number of Carnival performers.

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

11. Why does Gargantua steal the bells of the Notre Dame cathedral?
(a) To decorate the harness of his horse.
(b) To frighten the townsfolk of Paris.
(c) To sound the alarm for an impending invasion.
(d) To celebrate his marriage.

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

13. 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.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What do some critics argue has been absent from Russian literature?

2. How is the Rabelaisian use of tripe an excellent example of grotesque realism?

3. During Bakhtin's time, what genre was being closely defined by the Soviet government?

4. How did Rabelais obtain the material for his writings?

5. "Friar John" is heavily associated with:

(see the answer keys)

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