George Steiner: A Reader [Paperback]

George Steiner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195050681 | ISBN-13: 978-0195050684 | Publication Date: May 28, 1987

As an incisive and provocative critic of literature, language, and culture, George Steiner has acquired an international reputation and a devoted following. "He scatters bright ideas everywhere," writes The New York Times Book Review, "and they are sure to be picked up." This volume presents a rich sampling of Steiner's ideas, including selections from his seminal books The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and Language and Science. Aside from pointing to work that lies ahead, this anthology offers a rich retrospective of the intellectual ground Steiner has already covered. Whether discussing Marxist literary theory, the significance of Tolstoy, or the problems of treating sexual material in literature, Steiner's writings give us the pleasure of watching an astute and nimble mind constantly at work.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Steiner] is a remarkably powerful writer, as essays like 'The Hollow Miracle' and 'Postscript'...attest....[Here] he offers passionate, dexterous, erudite arguments."--The Christian Science Monitor

"George Steiner is arguably the most influential cultural mediator writing in English today. Through his essays he has exposed readers...to the latest news from the intellectual and literary fronts of Europe, in a style that is at once lucid and eloquent."--World Literature Today

"A plenteous feast--various and served up with intelligence and style...An intelligent, deeply felt humanism characterizes Steiner's work; a tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."--Los Angeles Times

"Steiner is a phenomenon. Reading him over the years, and now in portable form, I'm struck with the energy and, at is best, the relentless concentration of his thought."--Edward W. Said, The Nation

"No one now writing on literature can match [Steiner] as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing....[He] has commented with fine perceptiveness on a dizzying range of literary texts and cultural issues."--Robert Alter, The Washington Post Book World

"Steiner's style is by turns richly allusive, metaphoric, intensely concerned, prophetic, apocalyptic--and almost always captivating."--The National Review

"[Steiner is] in a class above most critics."--The Hudson Review

About the Author

George Steiner is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and honorary doctorates.

Product Details

• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 28, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195050681
• ISBN-13: 978-0195050684
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,366,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wizard of Modern Critics..., December 1, 1999

By 

Scott Lahti (North Berwick, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: George Steiner: A Reader (Paperback)

...or closer to the Wizard of Oz? In my original review of this book (NATIONAL REVIEW, July 26, 1985), I closed by asserting that Steiner "earns that backhanded compliment deserved by few academic critics these days: He is never dull." It is true that for a man of Steiner's prodigious learning and effervescence, verbal theatricality is not so much a tic as a conditioned reflex - decades of striving after the will-o-the-wisp of the Deeper Truth of the Cultural Crisis of Our Time have led him to pronounce dozens of "Eurekas" since his early days as the youngest fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, while still in his 20s (he was, and still is, the Orson Welles of belles-lettres). Authentic tragic drama as a Western tradition has fallen mute, overtaken by the radical catastrophes of twentieth-century politics (THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY, 1960). The German language has been hollowed out from within by the totalitarian lies of the Nazi years, and lies unredeemed by "The Hollow Miracle" (the title of an essay repinted in LANGUAGE AND SILENCE, 1967) of postwar German economic resurgence. The failure of the humanities to humanize Western, and more specifically, Central European, society (think of the commandant proceeding home from his day-job in the death camp to weep rhapsodic by evening over an exquisite rendition of Schubert), as seen in the world-historic catastrophe of the destruction of European Jewry, tells of a radical rupture in Western culture against which bland liberal meliorism must prove impotent. As such samples of Steiner's penchant for the grand symphonic arguments of the *Kulturkritker* attest, he is, between hard covers, not content to drive at relatively modest problems in cultural history, but nourishes above all the overarching ambition to, as Robert Alter has described it, present a sort of satellite's-eye view of our culture as a whole, in its mock-theological fundamentals, a task at which no mortal can hope to excel. And his preferred method is that of bold prophetic assertion rather than detailed reasoned argument. What a pity, then, that Steiner has yet to collect in book form the finest examples of a genre where he really has shone with a light of brilliance unsurpassed: in the art of book reviewing and intellectual portraiture, of conveying, as near as can be done in the compass of five thousand words or less, the distilled, reflective essence of a writer or cultural milieu, as if from the inside, an enviable gift Edward Said has described as Steiner's "ventriloquism." Here, where his targets are finite, and his subjects themselves are masters of the sort of existentially haunted themes Steiner himself is drawn to - Kafka, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Simone Weil - he has few if any peers among general-interest reviewers working since the Second World War. And his volcanic energies are nowhere better channeled than in depicting the now-vanished world of the Central European Jewish bourgeoisie, circa 1870-1939, which spawned perhaps the greatest concentration of intellectual talent seen in the West since the Enlightenment. A collection gathering some of these more modest, but extraordinarily evocative review-essays (which alone gave many of us our sole reason to buy THE NEW YORKER in the 1970s and 1980s) would be, to use a typical Steinerian locution, an "urgent responsion" to the need to show just what traditional book reviewing in the European style was at its best. There is no dishonor whatever in serving as ambassador to some of the finest work by others in your time, and in his lack of narrow academic inhibition, he has shown himself a master of the higher journalism. In a time when cultural commentary is otherwise too divided between callow hacks and jargon-ridden hyperspecialists, that is gift enough.