Real Presences - Softcover

The assertion that "God is dead" has profoundly affected theories of meaning and underwritten arguments of emptiness and absence in language and form, although it is these arguments of negation in modern poetic and aesthetic movements which make ours a time of the "afterword" or "epilogue" in a radically inventive way. But Steiner asks whether there can be any major literary, artistic or musical creation in the absence of the "rival Maker"? Does not the experience of a work of art wager on the sense of a presence that is ultimately theological? Professor Steiner is the author of "Language and Silence", "The Death of Tragedy", "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?", "After Babel", "In Bluebeard's Castle" and "The Portage to San Cristobal of AH".

Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff of The Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wrote Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and began The Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he published Anno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War. Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includes Proofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.