Designing Dead Souls : An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol / Susanne Fusso.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fusso, Susanne, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (212 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This strikingly original work presents an integral and inclusive explanatory model for the elusive narrative strategies of Gogol's Dead Souls; in the process, it draws larger conclusions about Gogol's creative methods and aesthetic concerns. Throughout his career, Gogol manifests two seemingly contradictory urges: the urge toward order, system, clarity and wholeness, and the urge toward disorder, disruption, obscurity, and fragmentation. The author seeks to make a system, an anatomy, of Gogol's impulses toward disorder and disruption in Dead Souls in all their various and distinctive aspects. In anatomizing Gogolian disorder, she explores the mythology of creativity and lying in Gogol; his (at least literary) fear of the family; the relation between the uses of obscurity in Dead Souls and the poetry of Russian Sentimentalism, especially Zhukovskii's; Dead Souls as parable; and the mutually subversive relation between ction and non ction in Gogol.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Note on Translations

Introduction

1 The Comic Plot of History

2 Plans and Accidents

3 The Uses of Obscurity

4 Fragment, Parable, Promise

5 The Landscape of Arabesques

6 The Final Tractatus

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-2358-0

OCLC:

1294426153