George Steiner on Literacy

A pleasure that I enjoy immeasurably is listening to good talks. Thanks to the magic of the internet, particularly YouTube, we have available an inexhaustible store of great content within easy reach. I would like to tell you about someone who is considered an intellectual giant: literary critic extraordinaire and professor of comparative literature, George Steiner.

I got to know about him around 2010 or so. He was one of the people featured in the Dutch TV documentary series, “Of Beauty and Consolation,” released in 2000. (It is available on YouTube.)

More recently I found a lot more of his talks on YouTube. But first, here’s an introduction to the man. I asked grok to do the needful.

George Steiner (1929–2020) was a French-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, and translator, renowned for his profound and interdisciplinary approach to literature, culture, and language.

Born in Paris to Austrian Jewish parents, he fled Nazi persecution with his family, settling in the U.S. in 1940. A polyglot and polymath, Steiner was educated at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, and his work reflects a deep engagement with Western literary and philosophical traditions.

Steiner was fluent in four languages: English, French, German, and Italian. He also knew Latin and Greek.

- Major Works: After Babel (1975), exploring translation and the nature of language, Language and Silence (1967), addressing the Holocaust’s impact on culture, and The Death of Tragedy (1961), analyzing the decline of tragic drama. His essays often blend literature, philosophy, and history, tackling big questions about meaning and morality.
- Themes: Steiner’s writing grapples with the power of language, the limits of human expression, and the moral responsibilities of art, especially in the shadow of 20th-century atrocities like the Holocaust. He was fascinated by the tension between creation and destruction in culture.
- Career: He taught at institutions like Cambridge and Geneva, wrote for The New Yorker and TLS, and was a leading intellectual voice. His style was dense, erudite, and sometimes polarizing due to its intensity and moral urgency.
- Legacy: His ability to connect literature to broader human concerns made him a towering figure in 20th-century criticism.

Now on to a talk of his that I just finished listening to — for the sixth time. I like to listen to some speakers repeatedly. It is not only a joy but it also has the side-effect of teaching me language. Through repetition I internalize not just the content but the form too. As Steiner says in this talk, one learns by heart what one loves. I am a big fan of rote learning of language. Listen:

A side-note: I generally extract the audio from videos of this sort. That way I can put it on my phone and listen to it without being distracted by the video.

That’s it for now. Please let me know in the comments if you liked the talk. Thank you, good night and may your god go with you.