Word: steiner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sharp pattern, is an all but impossible task. Perhaps the most useful and pleasantest way to consider the whole is in conversation-preferably with a multilingual, polymathic scholar. Last week TIME correspondents discussed the world of arts and ideas with two of Europe's leading intellectuals: Dr. George Steiner, a French-born American thinker who is currently a fellow of Cambridge's Churchill College; and Dr. Joachim Kaiser, principal critic for Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung...
ALMOST all of British intellectual and cultural life, said Steiner, is suffering from a lingering case of "historical fatigue," except perhaps in the field of science. "In the physical and exact sciences British achievements remain staggering. But in the humanities, if you ask where the great philosophical movement is, there is only a long silence. It is an awfully dead period. There have been 40 years of restoring order, sweeping and tidying up what had been all the rampant, unkempt, even outdated collections of philosophical theories. Now everything is clean, in perfect order and ready for bold new departures...
...Steiner sees most of the provocative new ideas in Britain as coming from the Continent. "The intellectual traffic over here is tremendous, particularly French Marxism and French structuralism. Psychoanalysis, which has ground to a halt everywhere else, is being given a transfusion of radical sociology in France in psychopolitics: Freudian categories are being applied to the problems of labor, industry and the middle class. Bored with pragmatism and objectivity, the young of Europe are generally moving into an age of myth and irrationality...
...German literature is fantastically alive-extremely radical, anything goes. The writers feel responsible for the omissions of the past-what Daddy did during the Nazi period. German theater and German poetry are also alive and crackling," says Steiner, citing the work of Peter Handke, 30, whose baffling, audience-infuriating plays (Kaspar, Offending the Audience) are not so much theatrical dramas as experiments with new language forms. "Also, Peter Weiss's theater of cruelty (Marat/Sade, The Investigation) will probably come to be seen as an experiment of enduring change." Among poets...
...Steiner is most impressed by Paul Celan, who recently committed suicide, and by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who, he says, is "trying to break open the whole clogged German form of style...