Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990

At the end of a century whose catastrophic violence has damaged irreparably the human capacity for hope, the advance of scientific knowledge has so deepened our understanding of the origins of life that the creation in the laboratory of genetic material capable of self-reproduction is almost an accomplished fact. In Grammars of Creation, a work of profoundly original synthesis, George Steiner seeks to articulate our experience of the present condition: he explores the complex relations between 'creation' and 'invention' in literature and science, music and mathematics; he explains how radically the electronic media are changing the ways in which we communicate and generate meaning; he demonstrates how the altered status of death - sanitized by medical technology, rendered routine and anonymous by casual brutality - enforces new understandings of 'the gratuitous miracle of creation'.