No passion wasted

In this work, George Steiner – one of the world's most celebrated literary critics – turns to language, its relationship to literature, and also to religion. Through three canons of Western literature—the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare—the author analyzes forms of "applied reading." In one of his Oxford lectures, transcribed in the work, he answers, for example, the question "What is comparative literature?" He also examines the works of Freud, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Simone Weil, as well as exploring the circuits of Hellenic heritage in the essay "Absolute Tragedy," in which he revisits Macbeth, Hamlet, Faust, and Phaedra. In an era in which the art of reading and the status of the text have been challenged by literary movements and new information technologies, the 21 essays in No Passion Wasted explore and reorient analyses of reading and literature in traditional formats, celebrating the primacy of the art of reading, in its classical sense.