Real Presences - Softcover

Steiner, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226772349 ISBN 13: 9780226772349

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1991

Synopsis

A powerful argument for the presence of the divine within art, from one of the twentieth-century's leading thinkers

In Real Presences, George Steiner, whom A. S. Byatt praised as "a late, late, late, late Renaissance man," addressed one of the most challenging and important questions about art and human understanding: Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or is God always a real presence in the arts? Drawing examples from across centuries and cultures, Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.

About this title

About the Author

George Steiner has written a great many books during his long and distinguished career as a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator. He was professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.

Reviews

Steiner asserts moral and metaphysical issues are the basis of all art and that our experience of meaning in music, painting and literature presupposes the existence of God as a "necessary possibility." "Dense, difficult, rewarding, this passionately argued essay ranges fluently over aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, post-structuralism, the range of Western culture," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226772349
• ISBN 13: 9780226772349
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246