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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What in Rabelais' novel is a travesty of Gospel miracles?

2. What did the word "pantagruel" colloquially mean in the Renaissance?

3. How is a "prophetic riddle" game carnivalesque in nature?

4. What happened to Rabelais after his novel was published?

5. How does Gargantua's letter to Pantagruel challenge and attempt to change Catholic dogma?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Bakhtin mean when he writes that popular-festive carnivalesque performances have no "footlights"?

2. How does Rabelais construct the episode of Epistemon's resurrection and of his visions in the underworld?

3. Why is the "Hippocratic Anthology" significant to Rabelais' work?

4. Why are eating and drinking two of the most important manifestations of the grotesque body?

5. What is the significance of "cuckoldry," and how is it portrayed?

6. How does Rabelais respond to the geographical changes of his own time and world?

7. Why does the logic of the grotesque ignore the closed surfaces of the body?

8. What is significant about the language in which Rabelais writes and the sources of many of his words?

9. What is the connection between the banquet and speech?

10. Why does Bakhtin assert that we cannot make the mistake of interpreting Rabelais' images of the material body lower stratum with our modern sensibilities?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Explain the role that herbalists, druggists, and physicians occupied in Renaissance France, and how Bakhtin incorporates them into his study of the marketplace in Rabelais' novel. How does Bakhtin relate the material body to physicians and medicine? How does Rabelais portray bodily ailments, physicians, heath, life, death, and birth?

Essay Topic 2

Describe how Rabelais uses Friar John as a representative of the Catholic Church. How does he describe Friar John? What situations does Rabelais put Friar John into, and how does the Friar behave? What might these situations and characterization say about the Church? How do official and unofficial modes of speech and communication work with Friar John? Does he represent the carnivalesque, the grotesque, or popular festivity in anything he says or does?

Essay Topic 3

Describe the relationship between praise and abuse. Use examples of this theme from what Bakhtin identifies as billingsgate and marketplace language and from popular-festive forms in Chapters 2 and 3. How were praise and abuse part of the tradition of "unofficial" language, and specifically how did they oppose "official" language? Are there elements of the grotesque in praise and abuse?

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