George Steiner
George Steiner, prominent literary critic, was born on April 23, 1929 in Paris to Viennese parents. Moving to America in 1940 with his family, he attended the Universities of Paris and Chicago, and Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, and he was appointed a Fellow at Princeton?s Institute for Advanced Study at the young age of 27. Steiner has taught at Cambridge University since 1961, and he has served as visiting professor at numerous other distinguished institutions.
His field is comparative literature. His work as a critic has tended toward exploring, often with great insight, cultural and philosophical issues of enduring interest, in contrast to what some regard as the nihilistic or narrowly political directions taken by much contemporary literary criticism. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.
Notable works
- Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958)
- Language and Silence (1967)
- In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971)
- After Babel (1975)
- Real Presences (1989)
- Grammars of Creation (2001).
