January 30, 2008
My Unwritten Books review
My review of George Steiner's My Unwritten Books has just been published in the Detroit Metro-Times. It begins:
"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love," wrote George Steiner at the outset of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, his first book. Nearly 50 years after that study’s publication, and nearly a quarter century after the release of A George Steiner Reader, the eminent literary critic and philologist carries on his interrogations into the uses, both practical and exalted, of language. In recent years a shadow of wistfulness has descended upon the ardor that has run through the many books he has written since that conspicuous opening salvo. In 2003 he published Lessons of the Masters, an analysis of the personal encounter between mentor and protégé that took in not only Socrates and Plato and Jesus and his disciples but also college football coach Knute Rockne. Its valedictory tone likewise underpins his latest, and perhaps most disparate, essay collection, My Unwritten Books.
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