[In Extraterritorial] Steiner pursues the trail he blazed with Language and Silence: an investigation into the very roots of communication; into how the special patterns of the some 4,000 languages now spoken in the world determine not only the course of the literature, but of the psychology, philosophy, and even the physiology of the people who speak and write them.

He maintains that if ever literary criticism is to transcend the facile or nit-picking minor art it has become, if it is not to go the way of the theological controversies of the late 19th century, it must somehow incorporate the discoveries of science (including mathematics), and that therefore the most fertile field for it today is the sort of study of structural linguistics and the philosophy of grammar that Noam Chomsky in engaged in when he isn't trying to extricate us from Vietnam….

Steiner sees that language is...