No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett [Hardcover]

An homage to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, this collection of essays sheds new light on canonical authors such as Ibsen, Beckett, and Strindberg. Using style and structure as the connective thread, Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing.1. Narrateur, Narratrice: Polyphonia in Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses 2. The Theatre of Fiction in Turgenev's Rudin 3. Architectonics in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler 4. Notions of Melancholia and Misogyny in August Strindberg and The Father 5. Jewish mysticism, the Commodification of Art and the Notion of Aura in Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 6. The Poetics of Prose Poetry in Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept 7. The Poetics of Repetition in Beckett's Watt ?

What is vital reading, vital generosity, and the courage to make these two, now often submerged crafts, immediately present?

Here in Mark Axelrod's essays these acts are given a generative and imaginative intricacy, beautifully shaped and recorded.

They evoke transformation, discovery, and a repository of experienced consciousness that has the nerve to both speak and challenge

and return these things to their precarious wonders. -Author of How the Night is Divided and A HalfMan Dreaming

In No Symbols Where None Intended, Mark Axelrod deconstructs the dramatic dimension of Laclos, Turgenev, and Beckett. Continuing Nabokov and Benjamin's rare tradition of critical virtuosity, Axelrod takes his nuanced arguments, themselves a wonder of structure and style, through a grand detour of original insights and never fails to bring them back home to unexpected and illuminating conclusions. - Pablo Baler, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, California State University, Los Angeles, USA