Thomas Carlyle: A Chronology 1795 Born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, of poor Calvinists who teach him frugality and discipline.

He is the oldest of nine children. His father, recognizing Thomas’s unusual ability, gives him a good education.

1809 Finishes Annan Grammar School, then walks ninety miles to enter Edinburgh University, where he plans to prepare for the ministry.

1814 Leaves Edinburgh University without a degree. Teaches mathematics at Annan Academy and other grammar schools. Devours German literature and philosophy.

1818-1822 Undergoes spiritual crisis. Abandoning the Christian faith, he converts to believe in a secular order to the universe.

1823-1824 His first important work, ‘The Life of Schiller’, appears in the London Magazine. 1824 His translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister appears in the London Magazine. 1826 Marries Jane Baillie Welsh, the popular daughter of a doctor. 1828 Moves to a farm at Craigenputtock to econimize; continues writing for periodicals. 1829 Publishes ‘Signs of the Times’ in the Edinburgh Review, assessing the spirit of the age. 1831 Writes Sartor Resartus, his spiritual autobiography, but cannot find a publisher. A unique

work, combining novel, essay and autobiography, it is partially published in Fraser’s Magazine. Publishes ‘Characteristics’ in the Edinburgh Review. Meets John Stuart Mill, the intellectual and essayist who refined Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism.

1833 Ralph Waldo Emerson visits Carlyle at Craigenputtock. 1834 Moves to London; begins work on The French Revolution. 1835 Completes first volume of The French Revolution and lends the manuscript to John Stuart

Mill to read. Unfortunately, Mill’s servant uses it to kindle a fire, destroying the work and all the notes.

1836 Emerson arranges the American publication of Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh.

1837 Completes and publishes both volumes of The French Revolution: A History. 1838 Publishes Sartor Resartus in England. 1840-1847 Delivers a series of important lectures, among them ‘Heroes and Hero-Worship’

(1840). 1840 Publishes Chartism. 1841 Publishes On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 1843 Publishes Past and Present. 1845 Publishes his edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches with Elucidations. 1850 Publishes Latter-Day Pamphlets. 1851 Publishes The Life of John Sterling. 1853 Publishes Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. 1858-1865 Writes The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. 1866 Returns to Scotland to deliver the inaugural address as lord rector of Edinburgh University.

His wife dies, wherupon Carlyle finds and edits her diary. He grieves; he goes on to write very little.

1867 Publishes ‘Shooting Niagra: and After?’ in Macmillan’s Magazine. 1874 Accepts the Prussian Order of Merit from Bismarck, but refuses an English baronetcy from

Disraeli. 1875 Publishes Early Kings of Norway and Essay on the Portraits of John Knox. 1881 Dies and is buried near his family in Ecclefechan churchyard. Reminiscences published.

Passages from ‘Signs of the Times’: Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. … we might note the mighty interest taken in mere political arrangements, as itself the sign of a mechanical age. The whole discontent of Europe takes this direction. The deep, strong cry of all civilised nations, — a cry which, every one now sees, must and will be answered, is: Give us a reform of Government! A good structure of legislation, a proper check upon the executive, a wise arrangement of the judiciary, is all that is wanting for human happiness. The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this, — that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! To speak a little pedantically, there is a science of Dynamics in man’s fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate ‘motives,’ as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment. Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as Moralists, Poets or Priests, did, without neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the Dynamical; applying themselves chiefly to regulate, increase and purify the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake. But a wide difference is manifest in our age. For the wise men, who now appear as Political Philosophers, deal exclusively with the Mechanical province; and occupying themselves in counting-up and estimating men’s motives, strive by curious checking and balancing, and other adjustments of Profit and Loss, to guide them to their true advantage: while, unfortunately, those same ‘motives’ are so innumerable, and so variable in every individual, that no really useful conclusion can ever be drawn from their enumeration. But though Mechanism, wisely contrived, has done much for man in a social and moral point of view, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the chief source of his worth or happiness. To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

Matthew Arnold ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks of mine on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition about criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said: “Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” I added, that owing to the operation in English literature of certain causes, “almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires — criticism”; and that the power and value of English literature was thereby impaired. … the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence; the English critic, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. (‘Preface’) … because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward. And here, once more, culture lays on us the same obligation as religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that ‘to promote the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one’s own happiness.’ (Ch. I ‘Sweetness and Light’) Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organisations but machinery? Now almost every voice in England is accustomed to speak of these things as if they were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. (Ch. I)

1

T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965)

American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic, a leader of the modernist movement in literature. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. His most famous work is THE WASTE LAND, written when he was 34. On one level it describes cultural and spiritual crisis, reflected in its use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

“The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the

substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a

particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences

combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” (from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1919)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and youngest child of a distinguished family of New England origin. His forebears included the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington University in St. Louis, and on his mother’s side, Isaac Stearns, one of the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Eliot’s father was a prosperous industrialist and his mother wrote among others a biography of William Greenleaf Eliot.

Eliot was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis, Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard, where he contributed poetry to Harvard Advocate. He spent a year in France, attending lectures at the Sorbonne. After Eliot returned to Harvard, he completed a dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley, and studied Sanskrit and Buddhism.

In 1914 he moved in England and started to reform poetic diction with Ezra Pound, who was largely responsible for getting Eliot’s early poems into print – among them THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK in the Chicago magazine Poetry in 1915. The title character is tormented by the difficulty of articulating his complex feelings. Prufrock is a perfect gentleman and tragic in his conventionality. He has heard “the mermaids singing” but is paralyzed by self-consciousness – “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Denis Donoghue has pointed out in Words Alone (2000) that in his early poems Eliot didn’t start with a theme but with a fragment of rhythm, or motif. Prufrock has not the qualities of a person, he is a fragmented voice with a name. “Eliot’s language here and in the early poems

generally refers to things and simultaneously works free from the reference. He seems always to be

saying: ‘That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.’ When he gives a voice a name—Prufrock,

Gerontion—he makes no commitment beyond the naming.” (from Words Alone)

2

Pound also introduced Eliot to Harriet Weaver, who published Eliot’s first volume of verse, PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS, in 1917. Eliot taught for a year at Highgate Junior School in London, and then worked as a clerk at Lloyds Bank. A physical condition prevented his entering in 1918 the US Navy. In 1919 appeared Eliot’s second book, ARA VOS PREC (published in the U.S. as POEMS), hand-printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogath Press.

In an early essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Eliot propounded the doctrine that poetry should be impersonal and free itself from Romantic practices. “The

progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.…Poetry is not a

turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an

escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it

means to want to escape from these things.” Eliot sees that in this depersonalization the art approaches science. With his collection of essays, THE SACRED WOOD (1920), and later published THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM (1933) and THE CLASSICS AND THE MAN OF LETTERS (1942), Eliot established his reputation as a critic and had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste. In 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, a quarterly review that he edited until he halted its publication at the beginning of World War II. In 1925 he joined the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), becoming eventually one of the firm’s directors. Between the years 1917 and 1919 Eliot was an assistant editor of the journal the Egoist and from 1919 onward he was a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.

In the 60 years from 1905 to his death, Eliot published some 600 articles and reviews. Eliot’s principal purpose in his literary-critical essays was “the elucidation of works of art and

the correction of taste.” He wanted to revive the appreciation of the 17th-century “Metaphysical poets,” referring to such writers as Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Lord Herbert, and Cowley. He admitted that it is extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry and decide what poets practiced it, but praised the complex mixture of intellect and passion that characterized their work. In the essay ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935) Eliot stated that “literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological

standpoint….The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we

must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.”

Eliot’s first marriage in 1915 with the ballet-dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood turned out to be unhappy. She was temperamental, full of life, restless. Her arrival at menstruation brought extreme mood swings, pains and cramps; her condition was diagnosed as hysteria. From 1930 until her death in 1947 she was confined in mental institutions. Later Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. Carole Seymour-Jones has argued in Painted Shadow: A Life of

3

Vivienne Eliot (2001) that Eliot’s sexual orientation was fundamentally gay. Eliot avoided sharing bed with Vivienne, who started an affair with Bertrand Russell. Virginia Woolf once said: “He was one of those poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch.”

The appearance of The Waste Land (1922), a poetic exploration of soul’s – or civilization’s – struggle for regeneration, made Eliot world famous. Following Pound’s suggestion, Eliot reduced The Waste Land to about half its original length. The first version, with Pound’s revisions, was published in 1971. The long poem caught the mood of confusion after World War I, when everything in society seemed to be changing and many felt that pre-war values were lost.

Divided into five sections, The Waste Land is a series of fragmentary dramatic monologues, a dense chorus of voices and culture historical quotations, that fade one into another. Moreover, Eliot didn’t hesitate to combine slang with scholarly language. The waste land, an image of Spenglerian magnitude, is contrasted with sources of regeneration, such as fertility rituals and Christian and Eastern religious practices. Material for the work Eliot drew from several sources, among them the Grail story, the legend of the Fisher King, Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Dante’s Commedia, but when Dante finally is reunited with Beatrice in ‘Heaven’, The Waste Land ends ambiguously with a few words of Sanskrit. In a way the work fulfilled Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry”: “The poet’s mind is

in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there

until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and member of the Church of England. His pilgrimage towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry, starting from ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) to visions in FOUR QUARTETS (1935-42), consisting of ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding’, into which he integrated his experiences in World War II as a watchman checking for fires during bombing raids. These quartets represent the four seasons and four elements. Helen Gardner has described the whole work as an “austere and rigorously philosophic poem on time

and time’s losses and gains.” (The Composition of Four Quarters, 1978)

Eliot’s other works include poetic dramas, in which his dramatic verse became gradually indistinguishable from prose. MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL (1935) was written for a church performance and treated the martyrdom of St. Thomas à Beckett. In THE FAMILY REUNION (1939) Eliot took a theme of contemporary life, and tried to find a rhythm close to contemporary speech. THE COCTAIL PARTY (1950) was partly based on Alcestis of Euripides. Eliot took in it greater liberties with ordinary colloquial speech.

4

“What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns

when it leaves the theatre; not to transport the audience into some imaginary world totally unlike their

own, an unreal world in which poetry can be spoken. What I should hope might be achieved, by a

generation of dramatists having the benefit of our experience, is that the audience should find, at the

moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it is saying to itself: ‘I could talk in poetry too!’ Then

we should not be transported into an artificial world; on the contrary, out own sordid, dreary, daily

world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured.” (from Poetry and Drama, 1951)

Eliot was an incurable joker and among his many pranks was to seat visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars. To the poet’s pleasure, the American comedian Groucho Marx was his great fan. In 1964 he wrote to Groucho: “The

picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me

has greatly enchanted my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across

the street.” OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS (1939), Eliot’s classical book of verse for children, has achieved a considerable world success in a musical adaptation. His most influential exercises in social criticism were THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY (1939) and NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE (1948).

Eliot died in London on January 4, 1965. His fame has been shadowed by accusations of racism, misogynism, fascism, emotional coldness, and anti-Semitism, which has made him unpleasant for many readers. However, he has not been regarded as a Communist. Hints of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, like in the poem ‘Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar’, has been considered a questionable outgrowth of his theology, or due to a class prejudice, but never the center of his thought. The poem’s reputation, however, is notorious, but the possibility that Eliot perhaps was parodying anti-semitism or made a statement on misreading Dante, also offers an alternative way of reading it. (see Patricia Sloane’s work T.S.

Eliot’s Bleistein Poems, 2000)

↑©Archana Srinivasan, Biographies of Nobel Laureates (Sura Books, 2007), pp. 6-11.

～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～

For Lancelot Andrewes (1928):

The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-cathlic in religion. (Preface)

Writers

Professor George Steiner

Born

Paris, France

Genre

Non-Fiction (/writers?query=&genres[]=6) , Fiction (/writers?

query=&genres[]=3)

Biography

Professor George Steiner was born in Paris on 23 April 1929. His family moved to the United States in 1940 and he was educated at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of the editorial staff at The Economist in London during the 1950s before beginning an academic career as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1956. He was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton in 1959. He has been a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961 and was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

Professor Steiner has held visiting professorships at Yale, New York University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government and the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

He is currently Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

His non-fiction includes Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958), a critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel, The Death of Tragedy(1961), In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971) and No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-96 (1996). His book on translation, After Babel (1975), was televised in 1977 as The Tongues of Men. He is also the author of a number of works of fiction

1/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner

Critical

Perspective

George Steiner is experienced as a writer in many forms, but he is best known as a piercingly intelligent and shamelessly intellectual critic and essayist.

He is a true critic, not just an occasional reviewer; he is not merely an instantly reactive, insightful reader, but a thinker who develops coherent theories of literature; and he manages to do this using a frame of reference which is quite breathtaking in its scope.

There is some straight philosophy, but in the main his non-fiction work is general literary criticism of impressively broad sweep (and miscellaneous essays, reviews for The Observer, etc.). He is able to get to heart of very difficult thinking; the most impressive case of this being his exemplary Heidegger (1978, Fontana Modern Masters series), which takes this most awkward of philosophers and undaunted tackles him with confidence and clarity. It is a well-balanced exposition, but also distinctive - there is quite a lot of Steiner himself to be found in it too.

In 1960 he published his combined study of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky: An Essay in Contrast which is more than a simple reading of the texts but engages with the difficult ideas and ideologies of these two fascinatingly different writers. So it can be read as an interesting philosophical and biographical study, even if you've never read a word by either of the Russians.

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is fairly atypical, however, in that for the most part Steiner's subjects for study are not specific but are rather broad and thematic; among the best of these is The Death of Tragedy, which was published in 1961. Unusually for a work with such a broad sweep across millennia of literature, it maintains a clear and unified thematic treatment of its subject, and has a single main thesis to be made, as he surveys the field from the ancient Greeks to the mid-twentieth century.

Some of Steiner's early criticism can be seen as leading up to his magnificent After Babel (1975). This wonderful book is a typically dense study of language and translation, mining his examples from all over the place (geographically and chronologically) and covering huge amounts of ground as he goes. It is extraordinary in making a real contribution to

including Proofs and Three Parables (1992) and The Portage to San Cristobal of AH (1981), which was adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton. A volume of autobiography, Errata: an Examined Life, was published in 1997. Grammars of Creation (2001) discusses a range of subjects from cosmology to poetry.

He is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to journals and newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplementand The Guardian.

Professor Steiner lives in Cambridge, England. His latest book is one of memoir, My Unwritten Books (2008). A collection of pieces written between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner at the New Yorker, was published in 2009.

2/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner

translation studies, while remaining fairly self-contained and accessible to people who have never before given the matter a second thought. As it deals with the problems - linguistic and circumstantial - of translation, it also helps us to think about how we look at language itself. Not only did it chart a great deal of previously uncharted territory - in truth it was the first thorough study of the subject - but also it has still not been surpassed in depth or breadth in the three decades since publication.

Steiner has found time to put together a bit of fiction too. There are a number of short stories, all clever and interesting, but none to rival the ambition and execution of his excellent novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1981). It is stronger on ideas (language, evil, guilt) than on characters, certainly, but it is sufficiently extraordinary and extreme, and there is sufficient tension created, to keep it a thrilling read, for all its Old Testament erudition. The premise of the story is that Adolf Hitler might not have died - as is generally believed - in the bunker in Berlin in 1945, but might yet be living somewhere, and might yet be discovered. In exploring the mysterious reappearance of this demonic figure in the depths of the Amazon, thirty years after the end of the war, Steiner deals bravely with dangerous material. He gives Hitler a voice, and words to justify his actions - and his voice is famously compelling, even (or perhaps especially) in its wilder ravings. In Hitler's voice lay his power, and Steiner is not afraid to let that voice speak again. 'His tongue is like no other. It is the tongue of the basilisk, a hundred-forked and quick as flame.'

Steiner's best work - this novella included - is prompted by investigations into the power of language, whether this is used to literary ends (it is no accident that his Fontana monograph is on Heidegger, of all philosophers) or marshalled for the perpetration of the greatest evil, as in the case of the Holocaust (the Jewish experience in the twentieth century is one of Steiner's most consistent preoccupations). This is the central concern of his collection Language and Silence (1967); among other things it explores the limitations of language, and the possibility that the only real human response to the atrocities of our age is not literature, with the redemptive powers it has always been assumed to have, but silence. Can we still make 'assumptions regarding the value of literate culture to the moral perception of the individual and society'? Steiner thinks not, and this for him is a cause for the greatest concern.

Steiner's own personal responses to the world of the twentieth century are gathered in a 'memoir', but Errata: An Examined Life (1997) is not a conventional autobiography. Although it does indeed inform us about his growing-up years, where he was when and what he did when he was there, its emphasis is on explaining the development of his thinking and interests over the course of his life. So there is little that is entirely new in it, but it does give us a new way of understanding - biographically - the sources of what we have read of his work already.

It would do Steiner less than justice to overlook his excellent collection of occasional essays No Passion Spent (1996), which covers subjects as diverse as Kierkegaard, Homer in translation, Biblical texts and Freud's dream theory. Spanning about twenty years, these pieces are united by a common concern for the importance and significances of reading, at this time when new technologies and theory have brought its conventions under threat. The opening essay - 'The Uncommon Reader'

3/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner

- is one of the most gratifying and most accessible. In it Steiner uses Chardin's painting 'Le Philosophe lisant' (used on the cover of the volume) as a starting-point for an exploration of what he calls 'the classic act of reading', as depicted in the picture. He explores all the things that this act properly requires - learning, silence and so on - and the modern threats to it (to learning, to silence) which make it an endangered skill and pleasure. As in all Steiner's work, even the little odds and ends of seemingly trivial occasional writing are sharp and readable - exemplary criticism and exemplary writing. For all his range it is his criticism that is truly the most excellent. It is this that ranks him among the great minds in today's literary world.

Daniel Hahn, 2002

Bibliography

2009George Steiner at the New Yorker, with Robert Boyers, New Directions

2008My Unwritten Books, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

2004Nostalgia for the Absolute, House of Anansi Press

2003Lessons of the Masters, Harvard University Press (US)

2001Grammars of Creation, Faber and Faber

1997Errata: An Examined Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

1996The Deeps of the Sea, and Other Fiction, Faber and Faber

1996No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996, Faber and Faber

1996Homer in English, editor, Penguin

1995What is Comparative Literature?: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 11 October 1994, Clarendon Press

1992Proofs and Three Parables, Faber and Faber

1989

4/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner

Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?, Faber and Faber

1986A Reading Against Shakespeare, University of Glasgow

1984George Steiner: A Reader, Penguin

1984Antigones, Clarendon Press

1981The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., Faber and Faber

1978On Difficulty and Other Essays, Oxford University Press

1978Heidegger, Harvester Press

1978Has Truth a Future?, The Bronowski Memorial Lecture 1978, BBC

1975Why English?, Oxford University Press

1975After Babel: Aspect of Language and Translation, Oxford University Press

1973The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik, Faber and Faber

1972Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, Faber and Faber

1971In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, Faber and Faber

1967Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966, Faber and Faber

1966The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, Penguin

1964Anno Domini: Three Stories, Faber and Faber

5/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner

1961The Death of Tragedy, Faber and Faber

1960Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, Faber and Faber

Awards

2001Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature (Spain)

1999Truman Capote Lifetime Award for Literature

1997Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Non-Fiction, No Passion Spent, joint winner with Louise Kehoe and Silvia Rodgers

1993PEN/Macmillan Fiction Prize, Proofs and Three Parables

1992PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, Proofs and Three Parables

1984Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France)

1983PEN/Faulkner Stipend for Fiction

1974Remembrance Award, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966

1972Cortina Ulisse Prize

1971Guggenheim Fellowship

1970Zabel Award (US National Institute of Arts and Letters)

1959O Henry Short Story Prize

1958Fulbright Professorship

1955Rhodes Scholar

1950Bell Prize

6/7 ページProfessor George Steiner | British Council Literature

2015/09/27http://literature.britishcouncil.org/george-steiner