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from the seams of the new puritanism to George Steiner as defender of the “world of yesterday”

An anthology of his texts that he himself made in life is published in Spain. The volume also includes unpublished that had never seen the light

★★★★★

Jesus FERRER

About a year ago George Steiner died. With him disappeared the awareness of the emancipatory value of reading, the humanist intellectual versed in multiple knowledge, the voice of intercultural tolerance and the liberal exponent of the best European identity. An insightful literary critic, an ironic commentator on reality, a determined defender of the pedagogical recovery of the Greco-Latin world, his characteristic bonhomie was evidence of an independent spirit of uncompromising ethical integrity. Essays such as “After Babel”, “Real Presences” or “The Idea of ​​Europe” constitute a solid intellectual legacy to which we can now add the publication of “A Reader”, which includes unpublished texts.

Steiner selects fragments that constitute the warp of his most representative cultural obsessions: the moral significance of the arts, the varied human significance of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, his fascination for music – Schönberg above all -, Tolstoian nihilism, the shocking Nazi affiliation of Heidegger, the initial closeness and subsequent critical distance towards Luckacs’ theories, the lights and shadows of literary translation, the creative power of language, his misgivings about psychoanalysis or his ironic skepticism about the theater of the absurd, among other references.

The human condition

And always with the insistent idea that culture has a spiritual projection, that it must represent the best excellence of the human condition. This is how he details it: “Can we advance much more in our poetics of understanding, in our common search for the identification, interpretation and transmission of what is indispensable in literature and the arts without recognizing its significance?”

The multidisciplinary nature of his knowledge makes this essayist a standard-bearer of contemporary humanism, reminiscent of the Renaissance intellectual and the enlightened philosopher. A pioneer of comparative literature studies, an expert in the aesthetic drift of Linguistics, a staunch defender of the civil value of education and a popularizer of intricate theoretical questions, his work vindicates that Europe of Zweig’s “yesterday’s world”, because it is in a culture of artistic excellence and human rights where, for Steiner, European identity lies. This book stands as a beacon and symbol of that mentality that should be defended at all costs.

The extraordinary expository clarity and that the author knows how to combine amenity and rigor in equal measure

Nothing remarkable in these texts of who is already a classic contemporary essayist

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