La morte della tragedia

And it may well be the untranslatable poet who strikes nearest the genius of his own tongue. Steiner gives us a vast feat of erudition , he dazzles us with a sinuous thesis and then leaves us with a reading list. Manfred , Boris Godunov , and Wallenstein are just of a very few that Steiner paints in da Leggi tutto

(2016 read) It’s encyclopedic on tragedy, and perhaps the main profit to be had from it is to read about lesser-known playwrights (along with those major names you’ve never got around to), with Steiner’s superb abilities at description. It’s also the best kind of writer’s manual. For instance, if you Leggi tutto

I took advantage of my fixed immobilization forced to reread some books of Steiner. I began with real presences. Death of the tragedy is more ambitious. It is somewhere an history of the literature of the Greek until us. And particularly, he wonders about the disappearance of the tragedy as literary Leggi tutto

Questo saggio di George Steiner, scritto nella sua caratteristica prosa nervosa e scattante, s’impernia intorno a una domanda che credo prima o poi ci siamo fatti tutti nel considerare le vicende dei generi letterarî: come mai non si scrivono più tragedie, e come mai quelle scritte negli ultimi seco Leggi tutto

George Steiner here surveys tragic drama and what could be called the tragic spirit from Greek tragic drama of the fifth century B.C. to the 20th century. That's his subject. Broadly speaking, his purposes are three: to show in what view of life the tragic spirit has been grounded; to illuminate tha Leggi tutto

This is an absolutely stellar overview of Western tragic tradition. The sheer range of Steiner's knowledge and his raw skill in criticism makes the text a joy to read. It is a little outdated - Steiner's insistence that only the West has ever developed proper tragedy is a little reductive and has be Leggi tutto

([...] mój ulubiony krytyk ubolewał, że zmarnowałem tak świetny tytuł na tę właśnie książkę) [...]."Niestety z tym nienazwanym przez autora w przedmowie krytykiem jestem zmuszony się zgodzić. Cała idea książki – świetna, ale tylko w opisie. Faktycznie, Steiner pokazuje upadek tragedii per se, ale cz Leggi tutto

Very rarely am I this pleasantly surprised when my expectations are disappointed. Here's what happened: I checked out The Death of Tragedy because I wanted a book that would give me a solid overview of Greek tragedy. Something like, say, Greek Tragedy by HDF Kitto. I got that for the first ten pages Leggi tutto

"Modern man seeks to explain away suffering, to rationalize and mitigate it. The tragic sensibility, however, accepts suffering as intrinsic and irredeemable." In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner does not merely offer a scholarly analysis of tragic literature; he composes a requiem for an entire Leggi tutto