Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08723_Field_TCGG T488.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 937b | 16 lines

knowledge. The price of conquering the new world of gigantic
dimensions was simply to enter Pantagruel’s mouth. Erich
Auerbach devotes the eleventh chapter of Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature  to “The World in
Pantagruel’s Mouth.” Auerbach notes (p. 269) some of the
predecessors of Rabelais’ fantasy in order to do justice to the
originality of Rabelais who “maintains a constant interplay of
different locales, different themes and different levels of style.”
Like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy  later on, Rabelais
follows the “principle of the promiscuous intermingling of the
categories of event, experience, and knowledge, as well as of
dimensions and styles.”

     Again, Rabelais is like a medieval glossator of the Roman
law in supporting his absurd opinions with a welter of learning
which manifests “rapid shifts between a multiplicity of