Volume 27, Number 10 · June 12, 1980
Laugh-in with Rabelais
By D.P. Walker
Rabelais
by M.A. Screech
Cornell University Press, 495 pp., $39.50
Gérard Defaux, in his Pantagruel et les sophistes (1973), announced that the study of Rabelais now has its 'querelle des anciens et des modernes.' By this he means a quarrel between the Ancients who follow the traditional method of interpreting texts by bringing to bear on them as much relevant historical information as possible, and the Moderns who, wishing to concentrate on the text in itself, regard such information as a pernicious distraction from a purely aesthetic, timeless appreciation. The latter, as he says, when writing on Rabelais's novel are more likely to cite Chomsky, Jakobson, and Lévi-Strauss than the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, or the Scholastics.
Review, 3731 words
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