Interpreting Rabelais: An Open Text Reading of an Open Text

Synopsis

Focusing on the works of Rabelais, this text identifies certain authorial strategies of variety, such as visual detail, character function, spatiality and temporality. It indicates how these are combined to create a textual pattern which maximizes the reader's initiative and allows him to enjoy literary freedom. The book seeks at once to define more clearly such notions as polyphony and polyvalency and to add to them a number of other headings - such as polylexy and polychromy - which are appropriate to other areas of Rabelais' technique, but at the same time to prevent these terms from establishing a set of rigid schemata which would betray the fluidity of a universally open text.