Book description
This is an extraordinary collection of essays by one of this
country's most exciting and dramatic thinkers. The essays span a
considerable time. But they turn on a central, compelling theme. What
is meant by reading a serious text at a time when theories of language
and literature question the very possibility of any agreed meaning,
and at a time when new technologies seem likely to replace books as we
have known them since Gutenberg. This question is brought to bear
deliberately on the touchstone examples: the Bible, Homer,
Shakespeare. Also on Kierkegaard and Kafka. The closely-meshed
collection ends with a series of essays on the philosophic-theological
underwriting of communication, with particular reference to what
language tells us of Socrates and of Jesus. These essays by George
Steiner, distinguished critic and Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill
College, Cambridge, seek to conjoin the themes argued in such books as
The Death of Tragedy, Language and Silence, After Babel and Real
Presences. They speak of a profound, if sometimes troubled, joy.
Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA
and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the
editorial staff of The Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a
member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wrote
Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and began The Death of Tragedy (1961). In
1964 he published Anno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the
aftermath of the Second World War. Language and Silence was published in
1967. His other work includes Proofs and Three Parables, which Faber
published in 1992. George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been
Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received
numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de
la Légion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des
Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld
Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.
