Susan Sontag and George Steiner / The Last Jewish Intellectuals

 

Susan Sontag

The Last Jewish Intellectuals

Susan Sontag and George Steiner star in ‘Maestros & Monsters’

BY

DAVID MIKICS

NOVEMBER 26, 

“Have you ever been given an order and just followed it? Or are you incapable of keeping your mouth shut and doing what you’re told?” Susan Sontag said to a cab driver who proposed a faster way to get downtown. His response was predictable: Get out of my cab. “You can’t be serious!” a genuinely surprised Sontag exclaimed, and then trudged home through the heavy rain.

Obituaries / George Steiner

 George Steiner in 2010. ‘There has been nobody quite like him in contemporary British intellectual life.’ Photograph: Agf/Rex/Shutterstock

George Steiner obituary

Polymath devoted to an ideal of literacy as private reading and to exploring the relationship between the Holocaust and civilisation

Eric Homberger

Wednesday 5 February 2020

George Steiner, who has died aged 90, was a polymathic European intellectual of particular severity. In an academic career that took him from the University of Chicago to Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Geneva, Steiner held forth on tragedy, reading, the decline of literacy, the possibilities of translation, science and chess. He crossed swords with Noam Chomsky on linguistics and wrote the Fontana Modern Masters volume on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

The gravity of George Steiner

By Sheldon Chavez
-February 5, 2020

The word “awesome” is the most easily used by teenagers these days, but the range of learning that the critic and novelist George Steiner possessed was great in the old and adult sense: really, truly impressive. Steiner, who died on Monday at the age of 90, knew modern languages, ancient languages, classical literature and modern literature. He had memorized the rhymes of Racine and he could elucidate Joyce’s puns and he could tell you why the two were, in his opinion thorny but not cheap, superior to the prolixities of Shakespeare. It was what many people call a human encyclopedia – not in the American sense, a safe void of facts, but in that of the French Enlightenment: a critical repository of important knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were peppered with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker could not help but include. But they were never imposed or forced – his mind, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to admire the view at Heidegger. Steiner has always traveled on these roads. “Pretentious”, although a word that journalists sometimes use to describe it, was the last thing it ever was. He never pretended. He was himself a faculty of humanities, an academy.

George Steiner / Il postino

George Steiner

George Steiner

Il postino

Multilingual scholar George Steiner has for decades aroused suspicions for being 'a touch dazzling'. He has now made his peace with British anti-intellectualism.

Interview by Christopher Tayler
Saturday 19 April 2008

V

isitors to George Steiner's house in Cambridge are likely to be greeted at the door by Ben, an enormous Old English sheepdog. Like his owners, Ben is used to dealing with the press. "Monsieur Ben, the French call him," Steiner says. "French journalists in particular are always fascinated by him." Ben has appeared, Steiner notes, on the cover of a distinguished literary journal. Is it true that he has discriminating taste in music? "Ravel's Bolero - he growls. But he is fond of Tchaikovsky." "And Duke Ellington," Steiner's wife Zara, a Cambridge historian, adds from across the kitchen.

George Steiner, 2008
Foto de Colin MacPherson

You Really Need To Read This Terrific Interview With George Steiner

Laure Adler

MARCH 27, 2017

Editor’s note: George Steiner is generally regarded as one of the most significant Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. He has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, among others, and his books include the classic of criticism, “Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky,” “The Death Of Tragedy” and “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition Of Culture.” “A Long Saturday,” a book of conversations Steiner had with the French journalist Laure Adler, is being published this month by the University Of Chicago Press. Writing for The Washington Post in 1984, Robert Alter declared, “No one now writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing.”

The following conversation between Adler and Steiner has been excerpted from that book.

Laure Adler: The Jewish question, which has haunted your entire life, goes well beyond the existence of Israel, the settling of a people in a nation-state, doesn’t it?

George Steiner: That’s a crucial question. I have great contempt for armchair Zionists, who practice Zionism without ever wanting to set foot over there. The only time I had the huge privilege of meeting Ben-Gurion (very briefly), he said to me, “Only one thing matters: Send me your children.”

 ‘An extraordinary figure’ … George Steiner in 2008. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

George Steiner, influential culture critic, dies aged 90

The multilingual scholar was renowned for broadening English readers’ horizons and for his passionate moral engagement

Alison Flood

Tuesday 4 February 2020

The eminent literary critic and essayist George Steiner, who explored the power and limitations of language and culture in a series of hugely influential books, has died at the age of 90.

Born in 1929 in Paris to Viennese parents, Steiner and his family left for New York in 1940, shortly before the Nazis occupied the city. He was one of only two Jewish pupils in his French school to survive the Holocaust, and this experience clearly marked his future work.

George Steiner, Prodigious Literary Critic, Dies at 90

George Steiner in 2004. He was an essayist, fiction writer, teacher,
scholar and literary critic and fluent in three languages.Credit...
Tom Pilston/The Independent, via Shutterstock

George Steiner, Prodigious Literary Critic, Dies at 90

He ranged over subjects like the origins of speech, the moral power of literature and the future of truth — and sometimes drew criticism himself.

George Steiner, a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature’s moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his son, Dr. David Steiner.

An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic — he succeeded Edmund Wilson as senior book reviewer for The New Yorker from 1966 until 1997 — Mr. Steiner both dazzled and dismayed his readers with the range and occasional obscurity of his literary references.