Front cover image for No passion spent : essays 1978-1995

No passion spent : essays 1978-1995

George Steiner is one of the preeminent essayists and literary thinkers of our era. In this remarkable book he concerns himself with language and the relation of language to literature and to religion. Written during a period when the art of reading and the status of a text have been threatened by literary movements that question their validity and by computer technology, Steiner's essays affirm the primacy of reading in the classical sense. Steiner covers a wide range of subjects, from the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare to Kafka, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Husserl, and Freud. The theme of Judaism's tragic destiny winds through his thinking, in particular as he muses about whether Jewish scripture and the Talmud are the Jew's true homeland, about the parallels between the "last supper" of Socrates and the Last Supper of Jesus, and about the necessity for Christians to hold themselves accountable for their invective and impotence during the Holocaust
Print Book, English, 1996
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996
essays
xi, 430 pages ; 23 cm
9780300066302, 9780300074406, 0300066309, 0300074409
34978808

NO PASSION SPENT
Essays 1978-1995

By GEORGE STEINER

Yale University Press

Copyright © 1996 George Steiner.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-06630-9


Contents

Introduction,.......................................................ixThe Uncommon Reader (1978),..........................................1Real Presences (1985),..............................................20A Preface to the Hebrew Bible (1996),...............................40Homer in English (1996),............................................88A Reading against Shakespeare (1986),..............................108Absolute Tragedy (1990),...........................................129What is Comparative Literature? (1994),............................142Drumming on the Doors - Peguy (1992),..............................160Sainte Simone - Simone Weil (1993),................................171Trusting in Reason - Husserl (1994),...............................180An Exact Art (1982),...............................................190The Historicity of Dreams (1983),..................................207Totem or Taboo (1988),.............................................224A Note on Kafka's `Trial' (1992),..................................239On Kierkegaard (1994),.............................................253The Archives of Eden (1981),.......................................266Our Homeland, the Text (1985),.....................................304Through That Glass Darkly (1991),..................................328The Great 6 - logy (1992),.........................................348Two Cocks (1993),..................................................361Two Suppers (1995),................................................390Index of Names,....................................................421
Includes index