---

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

---

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

---