Polemique et polyphonie dans le discours humaniste

Rabelaisian criticism has long been divided by two irreconcilable trends: on one hand, partisans of a contextualization focusing on Rabelais' Evangelical militantism; on the other, supporters of a more formal approach emphasizing the ambiguity of a work that should not be reduced to a single ideological stance. It is nevertheless possible to go beyond this debate by showing that it is based on a Sartrian conception of ÒengagementÓ which cannot be applied to the Renaissance. In Humanist anthropology, polemics and polyphony turn out to be entirely compatible.