Professor George Steiner | British Council Literature 1/7 ページ

Writers
Professor George Steiner
Born
Paris, France
Genre
Non-Fiction (/writers?query=&genres[]=6) , Fiction (/writers?
query=&genres[]=3)

Biography
Professor George Steiner was born in Paris on 23
April 1929. His family moved to the United States
in 1940 and he was educated at the Universities of
Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge.
He was a member of the editorial staff at The
Economist in London during the 1950s before
beginning an academic career as a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
University in 1956. He was appointed Gauss
Lecturer at Princeton in 1959. He has been a
fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since
1961 and was Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of
Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

Professor Steiner has held visiting professorships at Yale, New York

University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an
honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an
honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the
Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government and the
King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He received the
Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and
in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

He is currently Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the

University of Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at
Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at
Cambridge University.

His non-fiction includes Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958), a critical analysis

of the two great masters of the Russian novel, The Death of Tragedy
(1961), In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of
Culture (1971) and No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-96 (1996). His
book on translation, After Babel (1975), was televised in 1977 as The
Tongues of Men. He is also the author of a number of works of fiction

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including Proofs and Three Parables (1992) and The Portage to San
Cristobal of AH (1981), which was adapted for the stage by Christopher
Hampton. A volume of autobiography, Errata: an Examined Life, was
published in 1997. Grammars of Creation (2001) discusses a range of
subjects from cosmology to poetry.

He is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to journals and

newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement
and The Guardian.

Professor Steiner lives in Cambridge, England. His latest book is one of

memoir, My Unwritten Books (2008). A collection of pieces written
between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner at the New Yorker, was
published in 2009.

Critical
Perspective
George Steiner is experienced as a writer in many forms, but he
is best known as a piercingly intelligent and shamelessly
intellectual critic and essayist.

He is a true critic, not just an occasional reviewer; he is not merely an

instantly reactive, insightful reader, but a thinker who develops coherent
theories of literature; and he manages to do this using a frame of
reference which is quite breathtaking in its scope.

There is some straight philosophy, but in the main his non-fiction work
is general literary criticism of impressively broad sweep (and
miscellaneous essays, reviews for The Observer, etc.). He is able to get
to heart of very difficult thinking; the most impressive case of this being
his exemplary Heidegger (1978, Fontana Modern Masters series),
which takes this most awkward of philosophers and undaunted tackles
him with confidence and clarity. It is a well-balanced exposition, but
also distinctive - there is quite a lot of Steiner himself to be found in it
too.

In 1960 he published his combined study of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky:

An Essay in Contrast which is more than a simple reading of the texts
but engages with the difficult ideas and ideologies of these two
fascinatingly different writers. So it can be read as an interesting
philosophical and biographical study, even if you've never read a word
by either of the Russians.

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is fairly atypical, however, in that for the most
part Steiner's subjects for study are not specific but are rather broad
and thematic; among the best of these is The Death of Tragedy, which
was published in 1961. Unusually for a work with such a broad sweep
across millennia of literature, it maintains a clear and unified thematic
treatment of its subject, and has a single main thesis to be made, as he
surveys the field from the ancient Greeks to the mid-twentieth century.

Some of Steiner's early criticism can be seen as leading up to his

magnificent After Babel (1975). This wonderful book is a typically dense
study of language and translation, mining his examples from all over the
place (geographically and chronologically) and covering huge amounts
of ground as he goes. It is extraordinary in making a real contribution to

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translation studies, while remaining fairly self-contained and accessible

to people who have never before given the matter a second thought. As
it deals with the problems - linguistic and circumstantial - of translation,
it also helps us to think about how we look at language itself. Not only
did it chart a great deal of previously uncharted territory - in truth it was
the first thorough study of the subject - but also it has still not been
surpassed in depth or breadth in the three decades since publication.

Steiner has found time to put together a bit of fiction too. There are a
number of short stories, all clever and interesting, but none to rival the
ambition and execution of his excellent novella, The Portage to San
Cristobal of A. H. (1981). It is stronger on ideas (language, evil, guilt)
than on characters, certainly, but it is sufficiently extraordinary and
extreme, and there is sufficient tension created, to keep it a thrilling
read, for all its Old Testament erudition. The premise of the story is that
Adolf Hitler might not have died - as is generally believed - in the
bunker in Berlin in 1945, but might yet be living somewhere, and might
yet be discovered. In exploring the mysterious reappearance of this
demonic figure in the depths of the Amazon, thirty years after the end of
the war, Steiner deals bravely with dangerous material. He gives Hitler
a voice, and words to justify his actions - and his voice is famously
compelling, even (or perhaps especially) in its wilder ravings. In Hitler's
voice lay his power, and Steiner is not afraid to let that voice speak
again. 'His tongue is like no other. It is the tongue of the basilisk, a
hundred-forked and quick as flame.'

Steiner's best work - this novella included - is prompted by

investigations into the power of language, whether this is used to
literary ends (it is no accident that his Fontana monograph is on
Heidegger, of all philosophers) or marshalled for the perpetration of the
greatest evil, as in the case of the Holocaust (the Jewish experience in
the twentieth century is one of Steiner's most consistent
preoccupations). This is the central concern of his collection Language
and Silence (1967); among other things it explores the limitations of
language, and the possibility that the only real human response to the
atrocities of our age is not literature, with the redemptive powers it has
always been assumed to have, but silence. Can we still make
'assumptions regarding the value of literate culture to the moral
perception of the individual and society'? Steiner thinks not, and this for
him is a cause for the greatest concern.

Steiner's own personal responses to the world of the twentieth century

are gathered in a 'memoir', but Errata: An Examined Life (1997) is not a
conventional autobiography. Although it does indeed inform us about
his growing-up years, where he was when and what he did when he
was there, its emphasis is on explaining the development of his thinking
and interests over the course of his life. So there is little that is entirely
new in it, but it does give us a new way of understanding -
biographically - the sources of what we have read of his work already.

It would do Steiner less than justice to overlook his excellent collection

of occasional essays No Passion Spent (1996), which covers subjects
as diverse as Kierkegaard, Homer in translation, Biblical texts and
Freud's dream theory. Spanning about twenty years, these pieces are
united by a common concern for the importance and significances of
reading, at this time when new technologies and theory have brought its
conventions under threat. The opening essay - 'The Uncommon Reader'

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- is one of the most gratifying and most accessible. In it Steiner uses

Chardin's painting 'Le Philosophe lisant' (used on the cover of the
volume) as a starting-point for an exploration of what he calls 'the
classic act of reading', as depicted in the picture. He explores all the
things that this act properly requires - learning, silence and so on - and
the modern threats to it (to learning, to silence) which make it an
endangered skill and pleasure. As in all Steiner's work, even the little
odds and ends of seemingly trivial occasional writing are sharp and
readable - exemplary criticism and exemplary writing. For all his range
it is his criticism that is truly the most excellent. It is this that ranks him
among the great minds in today's literary world.

Daniel Hahn, 2002

Bibliography
2009
George Steiner at the New Yorker, with Robert
Boyers, New Directions
2008
My Unwritten Books, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
2004
Nostalgia for the Absolute, House of Anansi Press
2003
Lessons of the Masters, Harvard University Press
(US)
2001
Grammars of Creation, Faber and Faber
1997
Errata: An Examined Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
1996
The Deeps of the Sea, and Other Fiction, Faber and
Faber
1996
No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996, Faber and
Faber
1996
Homer in English, editor, Penguin
1995
What is Comparative Literature?: An Inaugural
Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford
on 11 October 1994, Clarendon Press
1992
Proofs and Three Parables, Faber and Faber
1989

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Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?,

Faber and Faber
1986
A Reading Against Shakespeare, University of
Glasgow
1984
George Steiner: A Reader, Penguin
1984
Antigones, Clarendon Press
1981
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., Faber and
Faber
1978
On Difficulty and Other Essays, Oxford University
Press
1978
Heidegger, Harvester Press
1978
Has Truth a Future?, The Bronowski Memorial
Lecture 1978, BBC
1975
Why English?, Oxford University Press
1975
After Babel: Aspect of Language and Translation,
Oxford University Press
1973
The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik,
Faber and Faber
1972
Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the
Language Revolution, Faber and Faber
1971
In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the
Redefinition of Culture, Faber and Faber
1967
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966, Faber and
Faber
1966
The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation,
Penguin
1964
Anno Domini: Three Stories, Faber and Faber

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1961
The Death of Tragedy, Faber and Faber
1960
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, Faber
and Faber
Awards
2001
Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature (Spain)
1999
Truman Capote Lifetime Award for Literature
1997
Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Non-Fiction, No
Passion Spent, joint winner with Louise Kehoe and
Silvia Rodgers
1993
PEN/Macmillan Fiction Prize, Proofs and Three
Parables
1992
PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, Proofs and Three
Parables
1984
Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France)
1983
PEN/Faulkner Stipend for Fiction
1974
Remembrance Award, Language and Silence: Essays
1958-1966
1972
Cortina Ulisse Prize
1971
Guggenheim Fellowship
1970
Zabel Award (US National Institute of Arts and
Letters)
1959
O Henry Short Story Prize
1958
Fulbright Professorship
1955
Rhodes Scholar
1950
Bell Prize

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