TheNexusInstitute (youtube) · CC BY 3.0

George Steiner spent a career asking what literature and criticism owed the Holocaust, and what they could no longer claim after it. Fluent across English, French, and German scholarship, he held professorships in comparative literature at Geneva, Oxford, and Harvard, writing studies such as After Babel and Language and Silence that treated translation and close reading as acts with moral weight, not merely technical ones. Colleagues who heard him lecture recalled him arriving with half a page of scribbled notes he never once consulted.