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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do oaths and curses have in common with town announcements and the calls of vendors?
(a) They are the only socially acceptable methods of greeting strangers.
(b) They all are familiar parts of the society of the marketplace.
(c) They all are forbidden during certain times of the year.
(d) They are all said with the same feelings in mind.

2. In the folklore and grotesque realism of Rabelais' works, excrement represents bodies and matter that are:
(a) One with the earth.
(b) Generally revered.
(c) Mostly comic.
(d) Frightening and terrible.

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

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

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

6. In Rabelais' time, jurons, or profanities and oaths, were most often concerned with:
(a) Family ties, such as one's in-laws.
(b) Marketplace vendors who cheated their customers.
(c) Sacred themes, such as saints and relics.
(d) Monarchs who subjugated their people.

7. How did the French Romanticists respond to Rabelais' works?
(a) With an appreciation of, and interest in, the grotesque.
(b) With complete understanding of Medieval and Renaissance culture.
(c) With disgust and negative criticism.
(d) They ignored Rabelais completely.

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

9. Curses in Renaissance folk culture tended to focus most closely upon the victim's:
(a) Body.
(b) Mind.
(c) Family.
(d) Spirit.

10. What is "man's second nature," according to Renaissance Christian doctrine?
(a) Man's higher spiritual calling.
(b) The thoughtfulness of the individual mind.
(c) The celebratory but degrading impulse toward gluttony, scatology, and sex.
(d) The way people act differently around those of another social class.

11. Why, according to Bakhtin, is Rabelais' parody of the Church not considered heresy?
(a) The Church received an annual tribute from Rabelais, so it overlooked his parodies.
(b) Rabelais maintains a comic style, so no one could mistake him for being serious.
(c) The clergy paid no attention to Rabelais' works.
(d) Rabelais follows every criticism with heartfelt praise.

12. Bakhtin thinks that life is:
(a) Organized by human acts of behavior and cognition.
(b) Meaningless and futile.
(c) A sacrifice the soul makes to the body.
(d) Inert, chaotic, and requiring the intervention of art.

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

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

15. Why was Rabelais linked so closely to the Lyon fairs?
(a) Lyon fairs represented one of the largest markets for publishing.
(b) Rabelais was a performing clown for several years in these fairs.
(c) The organizers of the fairs in Lyon banned Rabelais from attending them.
(d) Rabelais was a chief organizer of these fairs.

Short Answer Questions

1. Bakhtin connects Medieval "seriousness" most closely to:

2. When did the Russian Revolution occur?

3. Mikhail Bakhtin is:

4. What does Bakhtin find inadequate in Veselovsky's metaphor of Rabelais as a village boy?

5. How does Bakhtin interpret the relevance of the cries of Paris to Renaissance France?

(see the answer keys)

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