Rabelais Gargantua & Pantagruel

1. Rabelais Gargantua & Pantagruel

2. Sui Generis • Rabelais’ books look like installments of a novel, but really defies classification [like nothing else]. • Critical interpretations [two opposite views] • expression of a comic genius concerned purely with entertainment for its own sake • deeply-felt philosophical and religious messages • Rabelais was in constant danger from powerful opponents who explicitly condemned his works for the religious and political ideas which they expressed.

3. Literacy • By 1532 literacy was no longer just for the aristocratic and the highly educated. • Main market was the rising merchant class • Popular fiction was mostly made up of sensationalized prose versions of medieval epics and romances, replete with knights, damsels in distress, giants, magic, and sex. • Prospective buyers would have seen a story about giants, ensuring sales, but they got much more! • So popular were these genres that they were already being parodied [as does Rabelais & Cervantes]

4. Satire & Parody • Satire is a verbal or visual mode of expression that uses ridicule to diminish its subject in the eyes of its audience. • The authors are intent on making fun of the absurdity, pretension and degeneracy of the respective worlds they are portraying [usually the society they are currently living in]. • Parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art [like a sonnet or romance novel] in order to ridicule it. • When the conventions of a genre have become defined, authors often lampoon these conventions, making the reader laugh.

5. Humanism • philosophical and literary movement that centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth • emphasis on classical studies and a conscious return to classical ideals and forms as a result of the rediscovery and study of the literature, art, and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome. • formal education very highly valued • often a search for a utopian society where all are treated well and with dignity