• DOI:10.2979/JSS.1999.5.3.67
• Corpus ID: 161408799

Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction

@article{Cheyette1999BetweenRA,
  title={Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner's Post-Holocaust Fiction},
  author={Bryan Cheyette},
  journal={Jewish Social Studies},
  year={1999},
  volume={5},
  pages={67 - 81}
}

• Bryan Cheyette
• Published 1 June 1999
• Art
• Jewish Social Studies

here is something singularly paradoxical about George Steiner. An avowed elitist, he is also a tireless popularizer whose literary journalism, in both Great Britain and the United States, includes hundreds of uncollected pieces in the New Yorker, TLS, and London Sunday Times.' Steiner, the doyen of ineffability and seeker after "Real Presences," beyond the word, never stops speaking or writing. From his essay "Postscript" (1966) onward he tells us not to "add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable" and yet he endlessly invokes that which cannot be articulated. In a recent essay he notes, "It is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the Shoah." Unsurprisingly, he has increased periodically his own attempts to formulate, stylize, and codify an intelligible approach to the Holocaust. 2