February 09, 2004

The eagle has been landed!

Posted by Curt at 03:27 PM in Literature | TrackBack

Well, at least the Weekly Standard wasn’t all bad this week. Joseph Epstein finally took down George Steiner

Best Epstein description of Steiner: “an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.”

Most inadvertently hilarious Steiner line: “”the interactive, correctable, interruptible, media of word processors, of electronic textualities on the Internet and the web, may amount to a return, to which Vico would call a ricorso, to orality.” Well, yes, Vico might call it that. Then again, so probably would anyone else who spoke Italian.

Second-most inadvertently hilarious Steiner sentence: “Relations with Taoism and Confucianism will be those of rivalry and reciprocal insemination.” Reciprocal insemination—where the hell was he born? No wonder he thinks homoeroticism is so essential to teaching.

Comments

I'd never heard of Steiner before reading this article, but he sounds like a pompous ass.

Posted by: shonk at February 9, 2004 11:53 PM

The article was hilarious, and so is this essay generator.

Posted by: mock at February 10, 2004 10:55 AM