The Design Of Rabelais S

En analysant le “dessin” du Tiers Livre - sa composition formelle aussi bien que son intention sous-jacente - E. Duval dégage la cohérence profonde d'une œuvre qui passe le plus souvent pour ambiguë et “ménippéenne”. Cette cohérence, qui se manifeste simultanément à deux niveaux (celui du dessin de Pantagruel dans la quête, celui du dessin de Rabelais dans son livre), permet à l'auteur non seulement de résoudre plusieurs apories de la critique rabelaisienne, mais de découvrir dans le Tiers Livre des dimensions et des ironies inaperçues jusqu'à présent.

An accessible, readable account of Rabelais, his work, his thought and his world.

En analysant le “dessin” du Tiers Livre - sa composition formelle aussi bien que son intention sous-jacente - E. Duval dégage la cohérence profonde d'une œuvre qui passe le plus souvent pour ambiguë et “ménippéenne”. Cette cohérence, qui se manifeste simultanément à deux niveaux (celui du dessin de Pantagruel dans la quête, celui du dessin de Rabelais dans son livre), permet à l'auteur non seulement de résoudre plusieurs apories de la critique rabelaisienne, mais de découvrir dans le Tiers Livre des dimensions et des ironies inaperçues jusqu'à présent.

This is a systematic investigation of the earliest work of Rabelais' Pantagrueline epics. Combining textual analysis with attention to intellectual, cultural and literary contexts, Duval shows that, contrary to popular opinion, the Pantagruel is a coherent work in which every episode is indispensable to the whole.

In the first extended investigation of the importance of dramatic farce in Rabelais studies, Bruce Hayes makes an important contribution to the understanding of the theater of farce and its literary possibilities. By tracing the development of farce in late medieval and Renaissance comedic theater in comparison to the evolution of farce in Rabelais's work, Hayes distinguishes Rabelais's use of the device from traditional farce. While traditional farce is primarily conservative in its aims, with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo, Rabelais puts farce to radical new uses, making it subversive in his own work. Bruce Hayes examines the use of farce in Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the Tiers and Quart livres, showing how Rabelais recast farce in a humanist context, making it a vehicle for attacking the status quo and posing alternatives to contemporary legal, educational, and theological systems. Rabelais's Radical Farce illustrates the rich possibilities of a genre often considered simplistic and unsophisticated, disclosing how Rabelais in fact introduced both a radical reformulation of farce, and a new form of humanist satire.

Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.

In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.