an-born American
literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novel
ist, translator
, and educator
. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust
. An article in The Guardian
described Steiner as a "polyglot
and polymath
", saying that he is "often credited with recasting the role of the critic".
Among his admirers, Steiner is ranked "among the great minds in today's literary world." English
novelist A. S. Byatt
described him as a "late, late, late Renaissance man ...
The age of the book is almost gone.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
We are still waging Peloponnesian War|Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.
The Socrates|Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Anton Chekhov|Chekhov.