After Babel (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: George Steiner
- First Published: 1975
- Type of Work: Literary criticism/linguistics
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Linguistics
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, Culture, Language or languages, Literature, Education or educators, Communication, Writing, English language
Form and Content
After Babel is a long meditation on language, translation, communication, and cultural artifacts; each chapter presents an argument based on a particular combination of these subjects. Surprisingly, the book opens not with a critique of literary translation but with close readings of four passages from English literature. In William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Noel Coward, George Steiner has chosen four authors whose idioms (in the root meaning of that word) seem as far apart from one another as possible, both historically and...
[The entire page is 2341 words long]
