More from Steiner

[Prashant Kumar]

"...[b]ehind these questions lies the belief that literary criticism,
particularly in its present cohabitation with the academic, is no longer a
ver interesting or responsible exercise. Too much of it exhibits the
complacencies of academic or journalistic values and habits of statement
developed in the nineteenth century. Books about books and that flourishing
though more recent genre, books about literary criticism (a threefold
remove), will no doubt continue to pour out in great numbers. But it is
becoming clear that most of them are a kind of initiate sport, that they
have very little to say to those who would ask what coexistence is possible
between humanism, between the idea of literate communication, and the
present shapes of history. The gap between the academic, belletristic
treatment of literature and the
possible meanings or subversions of literature in our actual lives has
rarely been wider since Kierkegaard first pointed to its ironic breadth."

Preface to "Language and Silence" (1966)

Steiner seems to me to be reeling from the war, casting for meaning in the
wake of knowledge of what is possible; I see him as reactionary, in the
literal sense. Though he himself is in the category threefold removed.

So, my question, wherefore the critic?
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