Literary Style
Nadel depended on primary material and contemporaneous newspaper reports for his biography of Mamet. He focused on facts and less on interpretation and analysis.:284 Tom Stoppard also never interacted with Nadel during the writing of Stoppard's biography, and actually commented on "Ira somebody uninvitedly writing" his biography. To write about Ezra Pound, the author traveled to London to access the newly released MI 5 archives on the poet. For Cohen's biography, Nadel did interview his subject and obtained access to unpublished material and authorization to write the biography. Nadel's philosophy of writing biographies is that biographers need not interact with their subjects, but do need to appreciate their subjects' worth. As per Nadel, a biography should tell the reader who the subject is, not what the subject has achieved. He is concerned that the briefer modes of communication encouraged by social networking media such as Twitter may change how we capture and narrate others' lives. He speculates biographies may become packed into small fragments, as self-expression in general gets condensed by the influence of the new media.
In his literary criticism, Nadel analyzes text content. He thinks of texts as riddles, and in writing about Joyce, has looked at intertextual connections between Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.:8
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