Reading Rabelais's Gargantua

Undergraduate

How should the modern man be educated? Which virtues should a Christian prince possess in times of war? Can you be serious and funny at the same time? Gargantua, the life-story of a giant born from his mother's ear, published two years after Pantagruel in 1534, has surprising answers to these questions and more. It is with this work of excess, in form as much as in content, in which giants consume material and spiritual goods with equal enthusiasm, and in which received ideas are subject to harsh critical and comic scrutiny, that Rabelais invents the modern novel. Students undertake a close reading of the text in its modern French translation, alongside relevant secondary sources. All readings, discussions, and assignments in French. HU T 1:30pm-3:25pm