STEINER, George A(lbert)

Nationality: American (originally French: immigrated to the United States, 1940, granted U.S. citizenship, 1944). Born: Paris, 23 April 1929. Education: University of Chicago, B.A. 1948; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.A. 1950; Balliol College, Oxford (Rhodes scholar), Ph.D. in English literature 1955. Family: Married Zara Alice Shakow in 1955; one son and one daughter. Career: Member of editorial staff, Economist, London, 1952-56; fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 1956-58; Gauss Lecturer, Cambridge University, England, 1959-60; founding fellow, 1961-69, and since 1969 extraordinary fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge University; professor of English and comparative literature, University of Geneva, Switzerland, 1974-1994. Visiting professor, New York University, 1966-67, and University of California, 1973-74; Maurice lecturer, University of London, 1984; Leslie Stephen lecturer, Cambridge University, 1985; W.P. Ker lecturer, University of Glasgow, 1986; visiting professor, College of France, 1992; First Lord Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature, Oxford University, 1994-95; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard University, 2001-02. Awards: Bell prize (Harvard), 1950; Fulbright professorship, 1958-59; O. Henry short story prize, 1959; National Institute of Arts and Letters Morton Dauwen Zabel award (United States), 1970; Guggenheim fellowship, 1971-72; Cortina Ulisse prize, 1972; Remembrance award, 1974, for Language and Silence; Macmillan Silver Pen award, 1992, for Proofs and Three Parables; PEN Macmillan fiction prize, 1993; Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement award, 1998. Honorary doctorates: University of East Anglia, 1976; Lovain, 1980; Mount Holyoke, 1983; Bristol, 1989; Glasgow, 1990; Liege, 1990; Ulster, 1993; Durham, 1995. Fellow: Royal Society of Literature; British Academy. King Albert Medal, Royal Belgian Academy; Chevalier, Legion d'Honneur (France), 1984; Commander, Order of Arts and Letters (France), 2001. Member: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary).

Publications

Novel

The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. 1981. In Kenyon Review, 1979.

Short Stories

Anno Domini: Three Stories. 1964.

Proofs and Three Parables. 1992.

The Deeps of the Sea (includes The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. ). 1996.

Play

The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., adaptation of his own novel (produced 1982).

Other

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. 1958.

The Death of Tragedy. 1960.

Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. 1967.

Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. 1971.

In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes toward the Redefinition of Culture. 1971.

Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky in Reykjavik. 1973; as The Sporting Scene: White Knights in Reykjavik, 1973.

Nostalgia for the Absolute. 1974.

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 1975.

The Uncommon Reader. 1978.

On Difficulty and Other Essays. 1978.

Martin Heidegger. 1978.

George Steiner: A Reader (selections). 1984.

Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought. 1984.

Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? 1989.

What Is Comparative Literature?: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 11 October 1994. 1995.

No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995. 1996.

Barbarie de l ignorance: Juste l ombre d un certain ennui, with Antoine Spire. 1998.

Errata: An Examined Life (autobiography). 1998.

Ce qui me hante, with Antoine Spire. 1999.

Grammars of Creation. 2001.

Editor, with Robert Fagles, Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1962.

Editor, The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation. 1966; as Poem into Poem: World Poetry in Modern Verse Translation, 1970.

Editor, with Aminadav Dykman, Homer in English. 1996.

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Film Adaptation:

The Tongues of Man (television documentary), 1977, from After Babel.

Critical Studies:

"Steiner's Holocaust: Politics and Theology" by Robert Boyers, in Salmagundi, 66, Winter/Spring 1985, pp. 26-49; "George Steiner: On Culture and on Hitler" by Bernard Bergonzi, in his The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, 1986; "George Steiner's Portage: Holocaust Novel or Thriller?" by Michael Popkin, in Apocalyptic Visions Past and Present, edited by JoAnn James and William J. Cloonan, 1988; "Interrogation at the Borders: George Steiner and the Trope of Translation" by Ronald A. Sharp, in New Literary History, 21(1), Autumn 1989, pp. 133-62; "Judaism and the Rhetoric of Authority: George Steiner's Textual Homeland" by Norman Finkelstein, in his The Ritual of New Creation, 1992; "The Mind of a Critical Moralist: Steiner as Jew" by Edith Wyschogrod, in New England Review, 15, Spring 1993, pp. 168-88; Reading George Steiner, edited by Nathan A. Scott and Ronald A. Sharp, 1994; "The Struggle between Text and Land in Contemporary Jewry: Reflections on George Steiner's Our Homeland, the Text" by Dow Marmur, in History of European Ideas, 20(4-6), February, 1995, pp. 807-13; "The Holocaust, George Steiner, and Tragic Discourse" by Joan Peterson, in Rendezvous, 34(1), Fall 1999, pp. 93-105; "Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction" by Bryan Cheyette, in Jewish Social Studies, 5(3), Spring/Summer 1999, pp. 67-81.

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Born in 1929, George Steiner grew up in Paris and New York City. His father was a Czech Jew who emerged from humble circumstances to achieve considerable success as an investment banker, and his mother was Viennese. Steiner's education in languages began early. As he himself put it in his autobiography, Errata, "My mother, so Viennese, habitually began a sentence in one language and ended it in another. She seemed unaware of the dazzling modulations and shifts in intent this produced." His formal schooling began at a French lycée in New York, took him briefly to the University of Chicago, and concluded at Oxford University, where he received a Ph.D. in English literature. For many years Steiner has taught literature at both Cambridge University and the University of Geneva.

While still in his mid thirties, Steiner became one of the West's most formidable literary critics. There are a number of reasons for his swift rise. Steiner's learning is vast, but his sentences are short. Even when he takes on the most recondite themes, for example, the motif of Antigone in world literature, theories of translation from antiquity to the present, or the differences between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, he writes with compelling lucidity. Since the 1950s he has been a major presence in popular intellectual forums, such as the Times Literary Supplement. In fact, several of Steiner's most widely read books consist of essays he wrote for nonacademic publications. Furthermore, he has produced works of fiction. Like the German romantics, Steiner regards performance as the deepest form of criticism.

But Steiner is more closely allied with a more immediate intellectual tradition, what he calls "central European humanism," an amalgam of classical humanism and German dialectics. Steiner has suggested—albeit obliquely—that he inherited it from his father, whose passion was letters even if his profession was finance. And when he describes central European humanism, Steiner clearly could be sketching the main features in a self-portrait. He has written, "It has its markers: a sound knowledge of Goethe, and the realization that Goethe is one of the few genuine examples of a human being for whom civilization was a homeland. An uneasy, yet profound admiration of Wagner. Intimacy with Heine and Stendhal, with Lessing, Voltaire, and Ibsen. Men of that background tend to use Greek poetry, and particularly Homer, as a tuning-fork of the ideal. They regard Shakespeare as, in some essential way, a European, nearly a continental possession. They read Karl Kraus." The connection with Kraus, turn-of-the-century Vienna's most prominent cultural critic, is significant. Steiner shares Kraus's moral urgency. He also often adverts to Kraus's fascination with language, to which he feels "indebted." The same passion animates Steiner's own criticism.

Of course, Steiner belongs to a later generation, to a generation that came of age shortly after World War II. He is relentlessly candid about how history weighs on his belief in the creative miracle of language. Directly after claiming that his breakthrough work, Language and Silence (1967), is about the "life of language," Steiner poses the harrowing question "What are the relations of language to the murderous falsehoods it has been made to articulate in certain totalitarian regimes?" Elsewhere in the same preface he formulates his challenge even more poignantly: "We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, that has grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of the spirit are transferable to those of conduct?" Above all, Steiner's cultural importance derives from the fact that he has brought his enormous erudition and rare perspicacity and articulateness to bear on this problem, while addressing it more insistently than anyone else. Not only is it the subject of Language and Silence, his most successful book of criticism, but the shadow cast on language by the Holocaust is one of the main themes in Steiner's most influential foray into the writing of fiction, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.

—Paul Reitter

See the essay on The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.