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This volume offers a rich sampling of George Steiner's writing, including essays from his seminal books After Babel, The Death of Tragedy, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Language and Science, and Antigones. It also includes excerpts from his novel, The Portage of San Cristobel of A.H., and a reprint of "The Cleric of Treason," on the British spy scandal surrounding Sir Anthony Blunt.
An education in a portmanteau: George Steiner at The New Yorker collects his best work from his more than 150 pieces for the magazine. Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to “the common reader.” He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children’s games, war-time Britain, Hitler’s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.
George Steiner, the eminent professor of English at Cambridge and Geneva universities, has outlined seven books he has never written, but has always wanted to write, in seven sections. In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities. The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among, when they confront, the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness. Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.
Real Presences argues that any understanding of the nature of language is based on the assumption of God's presence, and discusses the influence of this on literary criticism.
When it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpreta...
A study of the theory and processes of language translation since the eighteenth century.
Are great works of art, literature and music 'creations' or 'inventions'? Does the mathematician 'invent' or 'discover'? Exploring an often neglected field, this book asks whether the current revolutions in our means of communication and in the biological sciences, may bring with them radical changes in the concept of individual creation and of poetic and philosophical invention. Are we returning to ancient anonymities and collectivities in aesthetic and intellectual experience? Are music and architecture now at the frontier where, as Plato would have it, truth and beauty meet? In Grammars of Creation the eminent critic George Steiner brings his unparalleled acumen and erudition to bear on these and other questions. 'This is a mesmerising book . . . Expressed in prose that is unfailingly apt, luminous and evocative.' Guardian
One of our most noted and controversial thinkers, Steiner draws on episodes from his life to explore the central ideas and themes of his thinking and writing over seven decades, from languages to Homer to Jewishness.
The author presents a penetrating analysis of the collapse of Western culture during the last half of the twentieth century
George Steiner, born in 1929, is one of the preeminent intellectuals of his generation. Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of twentieth-century barbarisms, Steiner has probed the ethics of language and literature with an elegance and authority unmatched by any living critic. "A Long Saturday "is a series of conversations between Steiner and the French journalist Laure Adler. It addresses questions that have absorbed Steiner over his career, but in a more personal register than he has offered before. Adler draws out Steiner on his boyhood in Vienna and Paris before the war, on his education at Chicago and Harvard, and on his early academic career. Books are a touchstone throughout, of course, but Steiner and Adler s conversation ranges also over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and much more. Revealing and exhilarating by turns, this book invites all readers to pull up a chair and listen in on the conversation of a master. "