No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett - by M Axelrod (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, he writes: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." The essays in No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett use Nabokov's stylistic approach to well-known texts (fiction, drama and criticism) as a point of departure. Notions of style and structure link the three prose pieces discussed in the text, (Beckett, Smart, and Turgenev,) to the fiction and drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing"

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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