George Steiner: Critic

George Steiner was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on critic.

George Steiner: 148 quotes5 likes

“Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).

“In aesthetic discourse, no interpretative-critical analysis, doctrine or programme is superseded, is erased, by any later construction. The Copernican theory did correct and supersede that of Ptolemy. The chemistry of Lavoisier makes untenable the early phlogiston theory. Aristotle on mimesis and pathos is not superseded by Lessing or Bergson. The Surrealist manifestos of Breton do not cancel out Pope's Essay on Criticism though they may well be antithetical to it.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 76).

“Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.”

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. X (p. 351).

“Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 7 (p. 117).

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?”

"Humane Literacy" (1963).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love. In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as we were when we took it up. To borrow an image from another domain: he who has truly apprehended a painting by Cézanne will thereafter see an apple or a chair as he had not seen them before. Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers. We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communion we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it. In this attempt at persuasion originate the truest insights criticism can afford.”

Source: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1960), Ch. 1.

“Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).

“All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).