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

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 1-3

3. Narrateur, Narratrice: Polyphonia in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 4-12

4. The Theatre of Fiction in Turgenev’s Rudin

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 13-33

5. Theatrical Architectonics and the Poetics of Dialogue in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 34-47

6. Poetics of Melancholia and Misogyny in August Strindberg and The Father

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 48-58

7. 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”

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 59-67

8. The Poetics of Repetition in Beckett’s Watt

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 68-79

9. Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the Poetics of Prose Poetry

   • Mark Axelrod

   Pages 80-95

10. Back Matter

    Pages 96-99

    PDF

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.

• fiction
• Henrik Ibsen
• poetics
• poetry

"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

• Chapman University, USA

  Mark Axelrod

Mark Axelrod is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Chapman University, USA.

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