Bøger af George Steiner

In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities. The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among-when they confront-the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness. Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.

Imagine, thirty years after the end of World War II, Israeli Nazi-hunters, some of whom lost relatives in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, find a silent old man deep in the Amazon jungle. He is Adolph Hitler. The narrative that follows is a profound and disturbing exploration of the nature of guilt, vengeance, language, and the power of evil--each undiminished over time. George Steiner's stunning novel, now with a new afterword, will continue to provoke our thinking about Nazi Germany's unforgettable past. "Two readings have convinced me that this is a fiction of extraordinary power and thoughtfulness. . . . [A] remarkable novel."--Bernard Bergonzi, Times Literary Supplement "In this tour de force Mr. Steiner makes his reader re-examine, to whatever conclusions each may choose, a history from which we would prefer to avert our eyes."--Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal "Portage largely avoids both the satisfactions of the traditional novel and the horrifying details of Holocaust literature. Instead, Steiner has taken as his model the political imaginings of an Orwell or Koestler. . . . He has produced a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity."--Otto Friedrich, Time

George Steiner, one of the great literary minds of our century, here relates the story of his own life and the ways that people, places, and events have colored the central ideas and themes of his work. Brilliant and witty, his memoir reveals Steiner's thoughts on the meaning of the western tradition and its philosophic and religious premises. Selected as a 1998 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review "One of our great literary and cultural critics reflects on his life and the themes that have aroused his passion. . . . A beautifully written and intensely stimulating book."-Kirkus Reviews "No prominent critic shows us better why the great books matter and how to bring to our reading of them what concentration and awareness we're capable of."-Stephen Goode, Washington Times "This intriguing and thoughtful book is, and is not, Steiner's autobiography. Writing about his ideas comes more naturally to him than writing about his lived experience."-Victoria Glendinning, The Telegraph "A minor literary masterpiece."-Scott Stossel, Boston Phoenix Winner of the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism in 1999 George Steiner was recently Lord Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other American and European journals. He is the author of numerous books that have been translated into a dozen languages.

"We have no more beginnings," George Steiner begins in this, his most radical book to date. A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, this volume can fairly be called a magnum opus. He reflects on the different ways we have of talking about beginnings, on the "core-tiredness" that pervades our end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of our discussions about the end of Western art and culture. With his well-known elegance of style and intellectual range, Steiner probes deeply into the driving forces of the human spirit and our perception of Western civilization's lengthening afternoon shadows. Roaming across topics as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the history of science and mathematics, the ontology of Heidegger, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Steiner examines how the twentieth century has placed in doubt the rationale and credibility of a future tense-the existence of hope. Acknowledging that technology and science may have replaced art and literature as the driving forces in our culture, Steiner warns that this has not happened without a significant loss. The forces of technology and science alone fail to illuminate inevitable human questions regarding value, faith, and meaning. And yet it is difficult to believe that the story out of Genesis has ended, Steiner observes, and he concludes this masterful volume of reflections with an eloquent evocation of the endlessness of beginnings.

With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is "a hidden literary prose.""The poetic genius of abstract thought," Steiner believes, "is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel's Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf's non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely."

Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to "the common reader." He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children's games, war-time Britain, Hitler's bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.

George Steiner, born in 1929, is one of the preeminent intellectuals of his generation. Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of twentieth-century barbarisms, Steiner has probed the ethics of language and literature with an elegance and authority unmatched by any living critic. "A Long Saturday "is a series of conversations between Steiner and the French journalist Laure Adler. It addresses questions that have absorbed Steiner over his career, but in a more personal register than he has offered before. Adler draws out Steiner on his boyhood in Vienna and Paris before the war, on his education at Chicago and Harvard, and on his early academic career. Books are a touchstone throughout, of course, but Steiner and Adler s conversation ranges also over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and much more. Revealing and exhilarating by turns, this book invites all readers to pull up a chair and listen in on the conversation of a master. "

Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical compostion created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Any new book by Steiner is an event according to Eva Hoffman of the New York Times.

George Steiner, the eminent professor of English at Cambridge and Geneva universities, has outlined seven books he has never written, but has always wanted to write, in seven sections.

Acquaintance with the work of Martin Heidegger is indispensable to an understanding of contemporary thought and culture. His work has had a profound influence on a number of disciplines, including theology, Sartrean existentialism, linguistics, Hellenic studies, the structuralist and hermeneutic schools of textual interpretation, literary theory, and literature itself.

When we talk about education, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of "mastery," with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in pedagogy.

The Antigone myth in Western literature, art and thought.