The interfaces of intertextuality in the work of François Rabelais: the Bible under the range of laugh

Abstract

The work of François Rabelais is characterized by its stylistic-discursive heterogeneity, that is, we can find in it the most varied and contradictory literary genres and linguistic styles. Poetry is mixed with prose, satire is entangled to romances of chivalry, serious and engaged criticism is framed by comical and humorous facts, and the affected technical language gives way to eschatological and grotesque terms. In the midst of the enormous plurality of the Rabelaisian work that seems to capture the world in all its plurisignification, Rabelais introduces the resource of the intertextuality which, as we already know, is the presence of a text within another text. Inhis work, Rabelais, for instance, appropriates the biblical and Christian discourse having in mind different goals:either to play with this discourse to put its powerful dimension away and make of it a simple literary game or to satirize the Christianity of the time, its customs and dogmas. Thus, the aim of this article is to analyze the intertextual resources used by Rabelais to appropriate the biblical discourse and to analyze the role of these resources in the ideological configuration of the writer.