For some years now, George Steiner has been writing books and essays that deal with vast cultural problems on the one hand and subtleties of literary texture on the other; After Babel is a very large, dense, insightful study that puts together in a new way the intellectual and stylistic emphases of Steiner's previous work. His device for fusing the philosophy of culture with fine technical analysis is to examine translation: its history, practice, theory, and its almost infinite ramifications. The bo...

[Steiner's themes in Language and Silence] are established in the first two sections, which fill nearly 200 pages and might really have been used, with a select sprinkling of the other items, to make a more tightly argued book. The problems set out there are important, often disturbing and largely neglected ones, and it is part of the author's unique merits as a critic that he keeps them always in the forefront of his mind. His concern is with language as the richest and closest expression of ...

If you are interested in contemporary literature and are looking for intelligent direction, then [Language and Silence, a] collection of George Steiner's essays and reviews, is the book for you. Steiner has been mostly known for his two dazzlingly precocious works of scholarship, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy, but he now emerges as a cultural journalist who is as pertinent as he is erudite, a kind of latter-day Arthur Koestler. Language and Silence casts a bright and searching light ...

Tragedy is plentiful in life but scarce in literature; since the 17th century the tragic drama has been in bad shape, and George Steiner now pronounces life to be extinct [in The Death of Tragedy]. Since his inquest only takes into account the theatre, it would be possible to accept his verdict and still ask whether the novel and the cinema haven't usurped what was once the playwright's territory. But although he confines his attention to the stage, Mr Steiner refers to theatrical history only...

There is so much that is admirable in George Steiner's attitudes [in Language and Silence], so much in both his desiderations and his abominations to agree with, that his faults are all the more distressing. Or rather his one fault: a histrionic habit, an overheated tone, a melodramatization of what (God knows) is often dramatic enough, a proclivity to fly to extreme positions. The effect is to antagonize the reader on the brink of assent…. The difficulty with Mr. Steiner's reflections ...

[Professor Steiner's most recent publications are On Difficulty and Heidegger. We do not yet know what his] next book will be 'about', but we may guess, on the basis of such texts as are available, that the aboutness will direct itself—will aim its most urgent responsions—towards some great zone of silence ('topic' would be too restricting a term, too banal and ungiving in its locality) about which we do not, as yet, 'know' anything at all. You ...

In Mr. George Steiner's words, it is necessary in approaching [Tolstoy and Dostoevsky] to think "of literature as existing not in isolation but as central to the play of historical and political energies." In the context of Russian literature this might almost be regarded as a truism. It is difficult to think of any serious and useful criticism of the Russian classics in recent years which does not take the principle for granted. Mr. Steiner nevertheless regards it as one of the charact...

The recent preoccupation of all thoughtful practitioners of the humanities with language is [Steiner's] preoccupation. Semantics, semiotics, psycho-linguistics, structuralist literary criticism: these are his concerns. These he orchestrates in his continuing effort to explain how human beings communicate and what their manner of communication does to the content and style of their minds. Always well informed about the latest turns of Western discourse, he gives us astute extrapolations, so that we ma...

The area covered by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is vast; Mr. Steiner's arguments are numerous, close in themselves and yet rather loosely connected. The book, therefore, defies summary; it has to be read. In what follows I shall do no more than take up those of his themes that have particularly interested me, and have consequently aroused at least some degree of disagreement. The fifty years or so before the Revolution of 1905 were, as Mr. Steiner points out, "the anni mirabiles of Russian fiction.&...

[Steiner] is a very clever man (in which he reminds me of one very clever man in a Cornish town, whose story can wait for a paragraph or two). He is prodigiously informed (a fact his writing parades). If some colleague of his told me that, between anthropology, linguistics and archaeology, he kept a triple diary in Tupi-Guarani, Old Friesian, and Tocharian, I would believe it. He is adroit in [the essays collected in In Bluebeard's Castle]; you think 'I've got him', and up he com...

In Language and Silence and In Bluebeard's Castle Dr Steiner spoke of the 'retreat from the word', the distrust of language that has made us increasingly ill at ease in the interpreted world. This is still a major theme of [Extraterritorial], which takes Borges, Nabokov and Beckett as representative men, unhouseled and unhoused, warming themselves by rubbing two languages together. Their 'extraterritoriality', however, has compensatory graces: for the loss of confidence in...

In The Death of Tragedy, Mr. Steiner's thesis is that tragedy, after its glorious heyday in Greece, and again, though in quite different trappings, in Elizabethan England, made its farewell appearance in 17th-century France. Thereupon, because science and optimism, commercialism, and the rise of the masses replaced myths, heroic individualism, and the sacramental-tragic view of life, tragedy went into an inexorable decline. The romantics tried to redeem it from its dreary neoclassical crawl by crossb...

[Near the end of The Death of Tragedy] George Steiner expresses a credo that might more serviceably have appeared at the beginning. "I believe that literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof," he writes. "Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade."… Mr. Steiner is no literary sociologist or patriot, nor is he a Houseman poised at his mirror ready to slice his throat at the memory of some devastating line. You will find here ...

[Martin Heidegger], George Steiner's treatment of this over-and underestimated figure, is exemplary, or very nearly so. Only very nearly so, because he too shares, to different degrees, in both the under- and the overestimation. He admits, modestly, to lack of professional expertise in philosophy; and this doubtless accounts for his limited recognition of the large measure of good sense which is discernible in Heidegger's strictly philosophical criticism. On the other hand, it is hard not to f...

Language and Silence is George Steiner's collection of those articles he published between 1958 and 1966. It deals with a great many cultural events and preoccupations in that period and as such is interesting and useful. Some of the essays have real merits. One need not see Thomas Mann's Felix Krull in quite the same way as Dr Steiner to recognise its good qualities. Generally Steiner exposes much European cultural history that is normally unstudied, and exhibits, in his literary commentaries...

[In Extraterritorial] Steiner pursues the trail he blazed with Language and Silence: an investigation into the very roots of communication; into how the special patterns of the some 4,000 languages now spoken in the world determine not only the course of the literature, but of the psychology, philosophy, and even the physiology of the people who speak and write them. He maintains that if ever literary criticism is to transcend the facile or nit-picking minor art it has become, if it is not to go the way of ...

Mr. Steiner's "T. S. Eliot Lectures" for 1971 [published as In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture] return us, we are told, to issues posed by Eliot in his 1948 Notes towards the Definition of Culture. As far as I can make out, Mr. Steiner's problems arise from the barbarism of our century, on which Eliot had almost nothing to say. Steiner has a great deal to say about it in a tone of sustained eloquence, while seemingly presenting a causal a...