Comment Steiner Literary Thought

George Steiner is a famous American humanistic critic and outstandingintellectual of our time. He teaches at famous colleges like Princeton, Cambridge andUniversity of Geneva. His research fields involve literary theory, comparativeliterature and Translation Theory. Also, he is an active literary journalist, whofrequently writes columns for magazines like New Yorker. Moreover, he is anaward-winning novelist.For Steiner, language and literature of our time is in great crisis: on one hand,science holds the power of speech, and removes the right of self-evident fromlanguage and literature; on the other hand, popular culture, media, and the outrage oftotalitarianism degrade the linguistic vitality, in order to cover up or avoid the facts.As a Jewish survivor, Steiner takes on the legacy of Central European Humanism,and into which, he blends the survivor consciousness. He upholds classical cultureand tries to save language and culture from corruption.Steiner’s translation theory, which had absorbed the essence of Walter Benjaminand Martin Heidegger, belongs to hermeneutic theorist. He develops the famous foursteps of translation: trust, aggression, incorporation and restitution.The puzzle of Babel is not only limited to translation theory, but also afundamental question of Steiner’s Aesthetics. In his opinion, inhuman outrage andamusing consumption had polluted and degraded our language, making traditionalliterature and culture sliding into silence. But Steiner is not despaired-he has seen anemerging genre, the Pythagorean Genre, which merges music, science, philosophyand other cultural elements together, becoming the sound of our age.On the basis of New Criticism and other schools of criticism, Steiner sets up theunique Old Criticism. It is a criticism of canons. It concentrates on close reading aswell as social thoughts, metaphysics and literary tradition. It’s a synthetic of moralimagination, with qualities of anti-theory, classical, comparative, stylistic andtranslative.