Appreciation …

… The Critic’s Critic — George Steiner and the art of hopeful failure. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Steiner contended that exactly those philosophical, theological, political, and biographical issues that New Critics tended to bracket were of the highest priority when books like War and Peace, Notes from Underground, and Demonscame under consideration. … In Steiner’s reading, such a studied posture would have been impossible before Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. These Russian masters were not simply trying to give pleasure or to inform the reader’s understanding. They had designs on the reader’s soul.