Джордж Стайнер цитаты
Джордж Стайнер
Дата рождения: 23. Апрель 1929
Дата смерти: 3. Февраль 2020
Джордж Стайнер — французский и американский литературный критик, прозаик, теоретик культуры. Профессор Женевского университета .
Цитаты Джордж Стайнер
„We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can
play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the
morning.“
Preface.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Контексте: We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
„For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.“
"The Hollow Miracle".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
„It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.“
"The Great Ennui".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)
„Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.“
Источник: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).
„The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.“
Источник: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 302).
„The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.“
"To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
„The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.“
Источник: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).
„The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.“
"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
„A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.“
Источник: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 4 (p. 82).
„We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.“
Источник: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 1 (p. 3).
„Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.“
Источник: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. X (p. 351).