More from Steiner

[Markekohut]

I REMEMBER this in my bones.....It helped moved me to believe in talking about literature
" in our actual lives".   

Yes. 

Sent from my iPad

On 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?
>