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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. 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) Taboo in all settings but the royal court.
(d) Necessary to mercantile transactions.

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

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

4. What were "street cries"?
(a) The sobs of orphans who live on the street.
(b) The shouted, versified advertisements of market vendors.
(c) The warnings people yell when they throw the contents of their chamber pot out the window.
(d) The calls of the city bellringer telling the time.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. During the "feast of fools" and the "feast of the ass," laughter:

3. In Rabelais' time, why was the meaning of debasement often ambivalent?

4. Curses in Renaissance folk culture tended to focus most closely upon the victim's:

5. What common fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary device does Bakhtin identify in the Prologue to the Third Book?

Short Essay Questions

1. In general, what happened to the use of humor in literature after Rabelais' time?

2. What do Rabelais' long lists of names and epithets signify?

3. What is Bakhtin's general idea about the purpose of art?

4. What role do oaths and profanities fill in Rabelais' novel?

5. How does the marketplace become an indicator of folk culture in general?

6. What was Bakhtin's relationship with the Russian Union of Writers?

7. Describe the Renaissance student writings.

8. What is the underlying nature of all of Rabelais' images?

9. What do Bakhtin's examples of Rabelais' tales of extraordinary urination have in common?

10. What was the effect of the suspension of social hierarchies during Carnival?

(see the answer keys)

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