He is the author of such influential works as After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, The Death of Tragedy, The Language of Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, and Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. He has also published many essays and reviews in prominent publications in Europe and the United States, and his fiction has been highly praised.

Born in Paris in 1929, Steiner emigrated to the United States with his family in 1940. Steiner, who went on to earn degrees from the University of Chicago, where he received his B.A. in 1948, Harvard University (M.A. 1950) and Oxford University (Ph.D. 1955), is currently an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.

As the Norton Professor, Steiner will deliver six lectures this fall, dealing with many of the same concerns about meaning and language that his body of work reflects.

"My whole life I have tried to work at the borderline of literature and philosophy, where they touch," Steiner said. "It's a question of language, really."

Steiner will have the chance to meet with his Harvard hosts later this spring, when he comes to Boston to deliver a lecture at the Boston Public Library on May 5. He is also publishing a new book this April, entitled Grammars of Creation, to be published by Yale University Press.

--Staff writer P. Patty Li can be reached at ppli@fas.harvard.edu.