More from Steiner

[Keith Davis]

I have to say that I'm enjoying the Foster book about "...reading like a
professor...", and though it is certainly not criticism, it is informing my
reading, at least on a small scale. Isn't that a possible function of
criticism, to inform our reading, instead of just "this is good, this is
bad"? Maybe I'm looking at it too simplistically.

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Prashant Kumar <
siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:

> "...[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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