lingustically defined and varnished brilliance

books:


	• Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman George Steiner Yale University Press, 1998 - 440 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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lingustically defined and varnished brilliance

As which a dazzling composition whose mere origins and idioms stand enthralled and benighted as one, Steiner's capability of depicting an intellectually stimulationg and provoking masterpiece redefining literature and humanity through the speculum of contradiction and flamboyant texture of obstreperous ignorence is rejuvenating, thrilling and refreshing if not disgusting and dettering both in faith and knowledge.

After Europe

Steiner treats readers to a stimulating introduction of various favorite authors, chiefly, but not exclusively Jewish, 20th century, European, and all erudite but doomed. Steiner is interested in the movement of history against creativity. The Holocaust haunts and he cannot get over it. Why should he? He also offers a brief and moving autobiographical essay, in which he accounts for his extraordinary education both in Europe and then later in America. He has much in common with intellectuals such as Adorno, Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and other German and Austrian authors who did much to elucidate the prelude and aftermath of the catastrophe of the 20th century. Steiner's own family is from Vienna, but he was educated on the run from the Nazis, first in Paris, then in New York at the French international school. From there to the University of Chicago and to Oxford. He is grave, witty, passionate, and exciting. Like Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag, Steiner is an explainer, an interpreter, a critic, not a creative force, but his erudition is so expansive and his passions so great that his work makes the impression finally of those creative geniuses like Eliot and Joyce who did so much to shape our century.

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Did you understand the previous review?

Referring to the preceeding review: pedantry of such a bold-faced variety, (notwithstanding the author's ignorance of current orthographical conventions) leaves one astounded and disgusted. Unless it was a joke, in which case: ha ha. The book is so much more than the reviews contained on this page would have us believe. Buy it and enjoy.

How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been manipulated to circumvent the truth at high levels or charged with vulgarity and imprecision by mass-consumer culture? How can fractured language adapt to the demands of more exact speech required by mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions addressed in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

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