Doors Half-Open in Bluebeard’s Castle: George Steiner and His Heretical Essays in Modern Times
Keywords:
George Steiner, Holocaust, humanities, culture, post-culture, literacy, heresyAbstract
George Steiner was a French-American polymath and polyglot. Along with Umberto Eco, Steiner has been ranked among the very last European metaphysicians as well as a leading cultural critic of the 20th century. Although an erudite scholar writing extensively in four languages about the most pressing issues of late modernity, Steiner has never been very popular among the general public. While his original essays won critical acclaim, by intellectuals he has also been rebuked for his ill-judged, doom-laden and reactionary elitist visions. The following paper deals with Steiner’s most thought-provoking, “heretical” texts on the nature of modern barbarism and the basic inhumanity at the heart of the humanities. The aim is to suggest possible reasons for Steiner’s “persona non grata” status.
References
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1868. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Benda Julien. The Treason of the Intellectuals, translated by Richard Aldington. 1927. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006.
Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, MT: Harvard University Press,1979.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On the Constitution of the Church and State. London: William Pickering, 1839.
Finkelstein, Norman. “Judaism and the Rhetoric of Authority: George Steiner’s Textual Homeland.” In The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature, edited by Norman Finkelstein, 97-116. New York: SUNY Press, 1992.
Gilbert, Martin. “What do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler?” The Times, March 6, 1982.
Goodman, David G. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Aum, and Antisemitism in Japan. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semitism and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
Smith, Roger W. “George Steiner and the War Against the Jews: A Study in Misrepresentation.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 6, no. 2 (2011): 178–191. Accessed March 29, 2021. <https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol6/iss2/8>.
Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, Heft 6 (May 1963).
Steiner, George, and Laure Adler. A Long Saturday Conversations, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Steiner, George. Errata: An Examined Life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Steiner, George. George Steiner at The New Yorker, edited by Robert Boyers. New York: New Directions, 2009.
Steiner, George. “Il Postino,” interview by Christopher Taylor. The Guardian,April 19, 2008. Avilable at: <https://www.the guardian.com /books/2008/apr/19/society>.
Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.
Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Steiner, George. “The Hollow Miracle.” In Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, by George Steiner, 95–109. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Steiner, George. “The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.” In The Deeps of the Sea, by George Steiner, 18–148. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
Steiner, George. “The Retreat from the Word.” Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, by George Steiner, 12–35. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Steiner, George. “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Dr. Gilbert?” The Times, March 11, 1982.
Steiner, George. “Zion.” In My Unwritten Books, by George Steiner, 91–122. New York: New Directions, 2007.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, November 10, 1975. Available at: <https://ecf.org.il/media_items/1395>.
White, Nick. “The Ventriloquial Paradox: George Steiner’s ‘The Portage to San Cristobel of A. H’.” New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2002): 66–90.
Whitfield, Stephen J. “The Persistence of the Protocols.” Society 55, no. 5 (2018): 417–421.
