Making Empire Strange: The "Russian" Imperial Imagination of Nikolai Gogol

This course is dedicated to the study of the literary prose of Nikolai Gogol. Because Gogol's artistic output is relatively compact, students will read nearly the entirety of his prose fiction over the semester. The course, however, is not only author-centered. It is organized around a problem that proves impossible to avoid in Gogol's writing: empire. The course examines Gogol's prose as a sustained interrogation of the Russian Empire - its myths, bureaucratic structures, and civilizational claims - and considers how estrangement, satire, and narrative excess function as tools for making empire visible and strange.