The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Steiner, George
Steiner, George
(
Francis
George
Steiner
)
(
1929
–
), American critic and author, born in Paris, and educated at the Sorbonne, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford. His critical works include Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (
1959
); The Death of Tragedy (
1961
); Language and Silence (
1967
); In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes towards the Re-definition of Culture (
1971
); and After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (
1975
).
Steiner's
criticism is wide-ranging and multicultural in its references and controversial in its content: one of his recurrent themes is the way in which the 20th-cent. experiences of totalitarianism and world war, and, more specifically, of the Holocaust, have destroyed the assumption (self-evident, he claims, to
Dr
Johnson
,
Coleridge
, and
M.
Arnold
) that literature is a humanizing influence. Silence is the...
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