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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do Rabelais' various works indicate about the popular notion of urination?
(a) Urination is a medical mystery that baffles doctors.
(b) Urination is disgusting and should be done privately.
(c) Urination fertilizes the earth and creates bodies of water.
(d) Urination can only be used for comic purposes.

2. What style does Bakhtin find the prologue of _Pantagruel_ to be written in?
(a) It is innocent and childlike.
(b) It is ironic and maliciously exaggerated.
(c) It is rhetorical and persuasive.
(d) It is dark and foreboding.

3. Who is Janotus de Bragmardo?
(a) A scholar sent to recover church bells from Gargantua.
(b) A market vendor scheming to cheat Gargantua.
(c) A robber who stumbles across Gargantua's treasure.
(d) A clown who mocks Gargantua at Carnival.

4. 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.

5. During the "feast of fools" and the "feast of the ass," laughter:
(a) Was regulated by the town fools and farmers.
(b) Was forbidden everywhere but the marketplace.
(c) Was encouraged even in church.
(d) Was forbidden because of the sacredness of the festival.

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

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

8. Why does Bakhtin consider oaths, curses, and profanities elements of freedom?
(a) Slaves are prohibited from using such forms of speech.
(b) A person can form any sound into a curse or profanity.
(c) Populist uprisings often have profanities and oaths in their declarations.
(d) They are contrary to official modes of speech.

9. Bakhtin considers "thrashing" ambivalent, rather than strictly negative, because:
(a) The one who is thrashed explicitly agrees to the act.
(b) The act of thrashing is done out of kindness.
(c) The one who is thrashed is also decorated and celebrated.
(d) The act of thrashing is done to punish the individual.

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

11. According to Bakhtin, what is directly related to the oversized foods common at Renaissance feasts?
(a) Bodily restraint as a result of mind over matter.
(b) The general health of a town's population.
(c) The swelling of religious fervor during holy days.
(d) Grotesque portrayals of the stomach, mouth, and genitals.

12. What was the most prevalent medium of the culture of the common folk in the Renaissance?
(a) Printed newspapers.
(b) The spoken word.
(c) Semaphore signals.
(d) Pantomime.

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

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What are the "Catchpoles" of which Rabelais writes?

2. The core images of the prologue of _Gargantua_ are:

3. The vocabulary of the prologue of _Gargantua_ is:

4. What does Bakhtin consider the most indispensable element of folk culture?

5. Bakhtin associates Friar John's beating of the men with:

(see the answer keys)

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