Rabelais: Homo Logos

Alice Fiola Berry’s study on the fundamental importance of language itself in the four books of Rabelais leads the reader down the path trod by Panurge and Pantagruel. Berry demonstrates how language and logos are the source of comedy, the focus of attention, and indeed the closest elements to the main character of the texts. Nowhere is this import more clear than in the dominant theme of Rabelais’s volumes: the quest for truth. There, in the core of these texts, Berry teases out the ways that the legitimacy of language is most seriously questioned, and the limits of its power drawn.