A Long Saturday: Conversations

by George Steiner, Laure Adler, Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator)

Overview

George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else “writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing,” while the New York Times says of his works that “the erudition is almost as extraordinary as the prose: dense, knowing, allusive.” Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of modern barbarisms, Steiner probes the ethics of language and literature with unparalleled grace and authority. A Long Saturday offers intimate insight into the questions that have absorbed him throughout his career.

In a stimulating series of conversations, Steiner and journalist Laure Adler discuss a range of topics, including Steiner’s boyhood in Vienna and Paris, his education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and his early years in academia. Books are a touchstone throughout, but Steiner and Adler’s conversations also range over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and beyond. Blending thoughts on subjects of broad interest in the humanities—the issue of honoring Richard Wagner and Martin Heidegger in spite of their politics, or Virginia Woolf’s awareness of the novel as a multivocal form, for example—with personal reflections on life and family, Steiner demonstrates why he is considered one of today’s greatest minds. Revealing and exhilarating, A Long Saturday invites readers to pull up a chair and listen in on a conversation with a master.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226350387
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/08/2017
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

George Steiner has written a great many books during his long and distinguished career as a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator. He was professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.

Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator living in Chicago; she has translated numerous books for the University of Chicago Press and other publishers.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note vii

Interviewer's Note ix

An Unsentimental Education: From Exile to the Institute 1

To Be a Guest on Earth: Reflections on Judaism 15

"Every Language Opens a Window onto a New World" 37

"God Is Kafka's Uncle": From the Book to Books 60

The Humanities Can Make Us Inhuman: The Twentieth Century Has Morally Weakened Humanity 74

Epilogue: Learning How to Die 105

Editorial Reviews

"Borrowing and refashioning the NT’s Easter narrative, he sees human existence as interposed between a Friday of torment and a Sunday of redemption, blended in an anxious ambivalence."

Religious Studies Review