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I enjoyed Antigone. The majority of my reading is classics and criticism. I'm a competent reader. But this was impenetrable.
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Antigones
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According to Greek legend, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the order of Creon, king of Thebes. Sentenced to death by Creon, she forestalled him by committing suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon―between the state and the individual, between man and woman, between young and old―has captured the Western imagination for more than 2000 years. George Steiner here examines the far-reaching legacy of this great classical myth. He considers its treatment in Western art, literature, and thought―in drama, poetry, prose, philosophic discourse, political tracts, opera, ballet, film, and even the plastic arts. A study in poetics and in the philosophy of reading, Antigones leads us to look again at the influence the Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture.
"A remarkable feat of intellectual agility."― Washington Post Book World
"[An] intellectually demanding but rewarding book. . . consistently stimulating and sometimes disturbing."― The New Republic
"An. . . account of the various treatments of the Antigone theme in European languages. . . Penetrating and novel."― The New York Times Book Review
"A tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."― Los Angeles Times
" Antigones triumphantly demonstrates that Antigone could fill several volumes of study without becoming tedious or exhausted."― The New York Review of Books
"A remarkable feat of intellectual agility."― Washington Post Book World
"[An] intellectually demanding but rewarding book. . . consistently stimulating and sometimes disturbing."― The New Republic
"An. . . account of the various treatments of the Antigone theme in European languages. . . Penetrating and novel."― The New York Times Book Review
"A tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."― Los Angeles Times
" Antigones triumphantly demonstrates that Antigone could fill several volumes of study without becoming tedious or exhausted."― The New York Review of Books
328 pages, Paperback
First published October 18,1984
This edition
- Format
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328 pages, Paperback
- Published
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October 30, 1996 by Yale University Press
- ISBN
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9780300069150
- ASIN
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0300069154
- Language
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English
About the author
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See also: George A. Steiner, author on Management and Planning.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.
In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.
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si no haces tu tesis de Antígona esto es too much, pero si lo haces esto es mina de oro
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Chapter 1 - Antigone and the 19th Century. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Goethe, Hölderlin.
Chapter 2 - Why myths? Why Greece? Are Jung's archetypes an explanation of the imagination's dependence on myth or a symptom of it? A look at the possibility that the historical basis for the myth of Antigone be found in 5th Century BC Greek history. Don Juan as the only modern myth, not Don Quixote, Hamlet (Orestes), or Faust (Prometheus).
Steiner presents a theory that myths are a kind of embodiment of language, grammatical constructs. They are therefore tied on a profound level to the act of communication itself. Steiner doesn't make a lot of this theory, though he returns to it at the very end of the book with the "hunch" that, "we speak organic vestiges of myth when we speak." This idea seems more a kind of myth itself than any seriously meant theory, since Steiner seems particularly concentrated on the Greek myths, excluding other mythological traditions though, presumably, not other languages.
Some of this chapter is devoted to different, mainly 20th century, versions of the Antigone story, in no way meant to be comprehensive. Mostly it is devoted to a discussion of the characters who aren't Antigone: Iseme, Haemon, Sentry, Messenger, the Chorus, and Creon. The little he has to say on Tiresias and Eurydice are in the next chapter.
Chapter 3 presents a generally very good close reading of the key scenes of the play. For me, Steiner credits the play with a bit more than it contains when he gets to the Antigone-Creon confrontation. He sees here a confrontation encompassing and anticipating all future confrontations in drama, which he enumerates as 5 types: male / female, old / young, society / individual, life / death, humans / gods. He does admit at least that the male / female conflict here lacks a sexual element, and refers again to the Don Juan myth post-dating the Greeks. At the very end of the book, Steiner seems dissatisfied with his work: new understandings and interpretations crowd his brain, more Antigones are being imagined, the work is never finished. Is it even properly begun?
I find Steiner a great stimulator of thought, either in agreement or dissent. His thoughts on the place of the Greek myths in the Western mind touch on some of my own reactions to my recent readings of the tragedies. Here are communications from a dawn culture, the first human speech rising from a darkness of silence; the plays speak of a rise from savagery, almost an animal existence, to a state of civilization. It's as if the tales of infanticide, incest, lex talionis, and human sacrifice are told from living memory and the dramas witness the difficult and sometimes unsuccessful effort of humankind to grow beyond them.
Chapter 2 - Why myths? Why Greece? Are Jung's archetypes an explanation of the imagination's dependence on myth or a symptom of it? A look at the possibility that the historical basis for the myth of Antigone be found in 5th Century BC Greek history. Don Juan as the only modern myth, not Don Quixote, Hamlet (Orestes), or Faust (Prometheus).
Steiner presents a theory that myths are a kind of embodiment of language, grammatical constructs. They are therefore tied on a profound level to the act of communication itself. Steiner doesn't make a lot of this theory, though he returns to it at the very end of the book with the "hunch" that, "we speak organic vestiges of myth when we speak." This idea seems more a kind of myth itself than any seriously meant theory, since Steiner seems particularly concentrated on the Greek myths, excluding other mythological traditions though, presumably, not other languages.
Some of this chapter is devoted to different, mainly 20th century, versions of the Antigone story, in no way meant to be comprehensive. Mostly it is devoted to a discussion of the characters who aren't Antigone: Iseme, Haemon, Sentry, Messenger, the Chorus, and Creon. The little he has to say on Tiresias and Eurydice are in the next chapter.
Chapter 3 presents a generally very good close reading of the key scenes of the play. For me, Steiner credits the play with a bit more than it contains when he gets to the Antigone-Creon confrontation. He sees here a confrontation encompassing and anticipating all future confrontations in drama, which he enumerates as 5 types: male / female, old / young, society / individual, life / death, humans / gods. He does admit at least that the male / female conflict here lacks a sexual element, and refers again to the Don Juan myth post-dating the Greeks. At the very end of the book, Steiner seems dissatisfied with his work: new understandings and interpretations crowd his brain, more Antigones are being imagined, the work is never finished. Is it even properly begun?
I find Steiner a great stimulator of thought, either in agreement or dissent. His thoughts on the place of the Greek myths in the Western mind touch on some of my own reactions to my recent readings of the tragedies. Here are communications from a dawn culture, the first human speech rising from a darkness of silence; the plays speak of a rise from savagery, almost an animal existence, to a state of civilization. It's as if the tales of infanticide, incest, lex talionis, and human sacrifice are told from living memory and the dramas witness the difficult and sometimes unsuccessful effort of humankind to grow beyond them.
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George Steiner, unquestionably one of the most perceptive and linguistically sensitive of contemporary critics, offers in Antigones a major contribution to twentieth century literary criticism. In his earlier work After Babel (1975), which has already become a landmark study of language and translation, Steiner uses the biblical metaphor of the Tower of Babel in Genesis to underscore the complex layerings of meaning surrounding a text, the fluctuating historical and cultural connotations of words which make exact translation virtually impossible. In this work he accomplishes the almost impossible task of tracing the Antigones theme in literature from the original tragedy through two milleniums of literature. A study in the act of reading while considering other arts as well suggests the transcendent quality of this work. For example, the musical presentations of this theme are discussed considering works by Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, Orff, and Honegger. By the conclusion of the final chapter the cumulative effect of this seemingly slight work is simply overwhelming (as is much of Steiner's ouevre).
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Η οπτική του Σοφοκλή για την αντιστροφή του κόσμου των ζώντων και του κόσμου των νεκρών έχει προσλάβει συντριπτική επικαιρότητα για εμάς σήμερα. Πρόκειται για την νηφάλια περιγραφή ενός πλανήτη, που πάνω του οι σφαγές και ο πυρηνικός πόλεμος έχουν αφήσει αναρίθμητους άταφους νεκρούς ενώ στα υπόγεια καταφύγια, στις σπηλιές ή στις επιταγμένες κατακόμβες του οι ζωντανοί περιμένουν το τέλος τους στο σκοτάδι. Αυτή τη στιγμή οι άνθρωποι φαντάζονται,σκέφτονται,ζουν νέες Αντιγόνες,το ίδιο θα συμβαίνει και αύριο.
Υ.Γ. Και εγώ θέλω πολύ να φαντάζομαι ότι θα υπάρξουν νέοι Steiner
Υ.Γ. Και εγώ θέλω πολύ να φαντάζομαι ότι θα υπάρξουν νέοι Steiner
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See review by Jonathan Barnes on internet.
Later-- Barnes's review has now been pulled. It didn't leave much standing! Barnes is a very fine scholar.
Later-- Barnes's review has now been pulled. It didn't leave much standing! Barnes is a very fine scholar.
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Ο Steiner έχει εποπτεία όλου του υλικού σχετικά με την Αντιγόνη, έχει διαβάσει και κατέχει όλο το σχετικό φιλοσοφικό, φιλολογικό και κοινωνιολογικό σχολιασμό της τραγωδίας στη Δυτική σκέψη από τον 19ο αιώνα και μετά, και μας προσφέρει ένα έργο πυκνό και συναρπαστικό.
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El mite d'Antígona m'ha fascinat des que el vaig conèixer, i tenia moltes ganes de llegir aquest llibre.
El primer capítol m'ha resultat difícil, molt tècnic i disseccionant algunes versions, amb molta atenció a la traducció - interpretació de Hölderlin que no conec.
Els dos següents es corresponen a grans trets amb un recorregut històric de les Antígones que l'autor considera més significatives el segon; i una anàlisi minuciosa de la versió de Sòfocles i la relació amb altres el tercer. Son molt més senzills de llegir amb un mínim de coneixement del mite, i els he disfrutat molt.
El primer capítol m'ha resultat difícil, molt tècnic i disseccionant algunes versions, amb molta atenció a la traducció - interpretació de Hölderlin que no conec.
Els dos següents es corresponen a grans trets amb un recorregut històric de les Antígones que l'autor considera més significatives el segon; i una anàlisi minuciosa de la versió de Sòfocles i la relació amb altres el tercer. Son molt més senzills de llegir amb un mínim de coneixement del mite, i els he disfrutat molt.
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