Books, Arts & Manners: Beyond Babel

George Steiner: A Reader, by George Steiner (Oxford, 447 pp., $25)

George Steiner holds a unique place among present-day generalist literary critics. His reputation for enormous polymathic learning, his provocative manner of expression, and his obsessed focus upon the relationship between language, literature, and the Holocaust have led to considerable controversy among the specialist scholars in literature departments in America and Europe. Why was the incomparable depth and beauty of German classical culture powerless to prevent the eventual bestiality of the Hitler regime, and what was the relationship between the two? Can being excessively steeped in the arcana of specialized scholarship breed a latent malevolence? Is our mass technological society witnessing a decline in “humane literacy” and a diminution of our resources of language? Steiner’s raising of such questions, and his often extreme responses to them, have annoyed certain critics, who accuse him of a lack of decorum.

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Scott Lahti

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George Steiner: A Reader, by George Steiner (Oxford, 447 pp., $25)

George Steiner holds a unique place among present-day generalist literary critics. His reputation for enormous polymathic learning, his provocative manner of expression, and his obsessed focus upon the relationship between language, literature, and the Holocaust have led to considerable controversy among the specialist scholars in literature departments in America and Europe. Why was the incomparable depth and beauty of German classical culture powerless to prevent the eventual bestiality of the Hitler regime, and what was the relationship between the two? Can being excessively steeped in the arcana of specialized scholarship breed a latent malevolence? Is our mass technological society witnessing a decline in “humane literacy” and a diminution of our resources of language? Steiner’s raising of such questions, and his often extreme responses to them, have annoyed certain critics, who accuse him of a lack of decorum.