The assertion that "God is dead" has profoundly affected theories of meaning and underwritten arguments of emptiness and absence in language and form, although it is these arguments of negation in modern poetic and aesthetic movements which make ours a time of the "afterword" or "epilogue" in a radically inventive way. But Steiner asks whether there can be any major literary, artistic or musical creation in the absence of the "rival Maker"? Does not the experience of a work of art wager on the sense of a presence that is ultimately theological? Professor Steiner is the author of "Language and Silence", "The Death of Tragedy", "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?", "After Babel", "In Bluebeard's Castle" and "The Portage to San Cristobal of AH".