Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Steiner, George - Jonathan Culler

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JONATHAN CULLER

In Language and Silence and In Bluebeard's Castle Dr Steiner spoke of the 'retreat from the word', the distrust of language that has made us increasingly ill at ease in the interpreted world. This is still a major theme of [Extraterritorial], which takes Borges, Nabokov and Beckett as representative men, unhouseled and unhoused, warming themselves by rubbing two languages together. Their 'extraterritoriality', however, has compensatory graces: for the loss of confidence in language, the inability to feel truly 'at home' in it, is in substantial measure a reluctance to take it for granted, a painful awareness of its importance, which can lead to elegant, self-conscious artifice as well as to silence. Indeed, the retreat from the word has been rather noisy; and now, with much rattling of sabres, the forces are being regrouped under the banner of linguistics for a new campaign. That, roughly is the picture. There occurred in the...

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1. Introduction
2. The Times Literary Supplement
3. DONAT O'DONNELL [pseudonym of CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN]
4. Richard Gilman
5. John Gross
6. John Simon
7. Theodore Solotaroff
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. D. J. Enright
10. Nicolas Krasso
11. Geoffrey Grigson
12. Eliseo Vivas
13. Richard Freedman
14. Jonathan Culler
15. Raymond Oliver
16. James Fenton
17. P. F. Strawson
18. David H. Stewart
19. Copyright