Saul Bellow Research Articles

City and City Affairs: The American Cities in Saul Bellow’s Works

City and City Affairs: The American Cities in Saul Bellow’s Works

Writing Space and Death Experience in Saul Bellow’s Novels

ABSTRACT Death experience is sketched out as possibility rather than the end in Saul bellow’s novels, and it is approached and explored in correspondence to writing space and authorship. This study aims to shed light on the experience of death in Saul Bellow’s major novels concerning Maurice Blanchot’s elaboration on death experience that he offers mainly in his book The Space of Literature. Trying to figure out their possibilities and topographies in writing space, this study is concerned with three different death experiences in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein. It is concluded that, regarding the concerns and conditions, the space of writing helps the writer (embodied in characters Herzog, Humboldt, and Chick) die in this space and endure living in reality.

From other Exiles: Alienation or the Madness of Herzog?

This paper analyses how alienation in Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) results in madness and wisdom at the same time. Following this, the researcher will firstly examine the background of alienation and its silent assumptions by highlighting the following features: the search for truth, the marginalization, and the mental paralysis of the hero, Herzog. In line with the findings achieved at this stage, the researcher will secondly study how alienation scrupulously traces Herzog’s madness and wisdom, considering the relationships between alienation, on the one hand, and melancholy, oblivion and escapism, on the other hand. In the second part of this essay, the researcher will argue how madness is reflected in terms of wisdom and sanity. It is the wisdom of the marginalized intellectual in modern American society. Seen from this perspective, alienation and madness are argued to have satirical and allegorical dimensions as they entail reciprocal relationships with wisdom and sanity. The conclusion the researcher seeks to achieve is that when Herzog attempts to bypass and deconstruct the amoral ethics of modern American culture, he unexpectedly goes through various shifts from his being alienated, disregarded, rejected, mad and ultimately wise. Foucault’s (1967) and Deleuze’s (1968) concerns over the issues of madness and alienation prove to be an insightful theoretical platform in this paper.

Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher

Reviewed by: Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher Anthony Wexler Omri Asscher . Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2020 . 256 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000732 Although they often share geographic and linguistic origins, Jewish communities in Israel and America have come to be divided not only by language and location, but also by divergent conceptions of Jewishness. It would be easy to assume that the translation of literary works between these centers of Jewish life has helped bridge the gaps separating them, encouraging each to see itself as an organ of Klal Yisra'el . Omri Asscher's fascinating and original study on [End Page 226] literary translation tells a different story, however. He considers the translation of Hebrew works into English for American Jewish readers, and vice versa, from the 1940s through the 1980s, focusing specifically on the ways that translations of texts between Diaspora and homeland perform ideological work, exposing a "subterranean struggle" (175) between "rival siblings" (back cover) with different conceptions of Jewish life and culture. To this end, Asscher looks at the reception of literary works in and across both countries; sometimes, he points out significant instances of outright manipulation of translations. Two luminous examples at the start of the book introduce the scope and shape of Asscher's project. David Shahar's Hebrew novel His Majesty's Agent features an American Jewish character named Abie Driesel, an obvious parody of Elie Wiesel. In the English translation, however, Driesel's name was changed to Jules Levi, and passages that openly critique Wiesel and his brand of Jewishness were removed. The second example focuses on a 1971 review of Saul Bellow's Herzog in which the Israeli critic Alexander Barzel invites Sha'ul Bellow and his peers to "come home, to the nation's homeland" (2). These two moments show that the mediation of literary works for Jewish readers in both countries promoted and protected the ideals, values, and identities of the target culture—what Asscher describes as "a conversation of sorts, or negotiation of ideas, between two platforms of Jewish identity" (3). The first three chapters consider the absorption of Hebrew literature in American Jewish culture between the 1950s and the 1980s, a period during which Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity. Asscher identifies trends in translation practices during these decades, including an effort to highlight connections between "Hebrew literature's national underpinnings and American historical myths," which helped American Jews preserve a distinct sense of a Jewish and American national identity (45). Starting in the 1960s, Israeli writers, including Aharon Megged, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, began reflecting on the moral implications of the war of independence and the treatment of the Palestinian population. Asscher identifies two trends in the ways that American Jewish cultural agents responded to these critical accounts of the Israeli state. On the one hand, he argues that American cultural agents tended to describe them as "ethical expressions of moral opposition," labeling Israeli writers as the "dissenting voice of the humanistic Left in the country" (58). On the other hand, he argues that these agents sought to "soften" and "blur" (59) expressions of moral criticism in these works. Such censorship extended from the choice of texts for translation to the ways those texts were translated and interpreted in mainstream venues. The second chapter features a fascinating discussion of the ways that combat soldiers and Palestinian perspectives in these works were routinely modified or removed in translation, which, in turn, helped preserve Israel's moral image for American Jews. Asscher also considers how Jewish cultural agents in America responded to Israeli representations of Jewishness and Judaism that challenged Jewish American identity. He describes how Hebrew works that stressed the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, that openly denigrated Christians, or that highlighted the presence of antisemitic persecution were altered to help protect the standing of the Jewish community in America. These chapters, then, [End Page 227] can help us better understand the ways that the translation process helped mitigate the tension between Zionism and morality, ensuring Israel's function as a source of collective...

Modified Omniscient Narrative and Temporal Structure in <i>Seize the Day</i>

Impressing people with the profundity of its content and scope, Saul Bellow’s fiction is often the embodiment of alienation, meaning of life, men’s quest for spiritual discernment, and the possibilities of human awakening. Though the content and form have both shown their distinguishing excellence in his novella <i>Seize the Day</i>, it is always Bellow’s theme that is under vast investigation, while the other charming feature of this story – its way of narration is not often discussed. This paper aims to analyze the narrative of <i>Seize the Day</i> from the perspective of narratology, figuring out how omniscient narrative and temporal structure are disposed to convey remarkable characteristics to <i>Seize the Day</i>. In general, this story is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator, but the narrative voice is not an exclusive one all the time. Besides, the focalization of the omniscient narrator shifts whenever necessary, which devotes to exposing the instabilities of characters and events in the story. As to the temporal structure, variations existing in order, duration and frequency generate rhetorical effects in the story and make the structure of <i>Seize the Day</i> coordinate smoothly the interlaced temporal references, leading further instabilities and tensions to the movement of the narrative. In <i>Seize the Day</i>, Saul Bellow has showed a mastery of narrative voice, focalization and temporal structure, and demonstrated how incredible the narrative techniques can be in transferring a modified omniscient narrative and the temporal manipulation of acceleration and deceleration into a dynamic narrative progression, which offers readers the option to consider the possibilities of development, motivation and resolution in the entire narrative of the story.

Herzog in Venice: Richard Stern's Stitch, Ezra Pound, and Jewish American Literary History

Herzog in Venice:Richard Stern's Stitch, Ezra Pound, and Jewish American Literary History Michael Kalisch (bio) I The impression one gets reading Zachary Leader's two-volume biography is that Saul Bellow never made a friend he didn't manage to fall out with (Leader, Life, vols. 1 & 2). The novelist Richard Stern was no exception, although, by Bellow's standards, their near half-century relationship was relatively plain sailing—one reason, perhaps, why Leader spends little time discussing it. The pair met in early 1956, shortly after Stern joined the English department at the University of Chicago, where he became the unofficial writer-in-residence, establishing a long-running undergraduate course in creative writing. (He retired as Helen A. Regenstein Professor of English and American Literature in 2001.) Stern earned his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1954, becoming, D. G. Myers notes, part of the first surge of Writers' Workshop graduates who "fanned out across the country to institute at least twenty-five new [writing] programs" (165). In the fall of '56, Stern invited Bellow to address his writing class, and the pair kept up a regular, intimate correspondence while Bellow was at work on Henderson the Rain King (1959)—which Stern praised in a write-up for the Kenyon Review— and Herzog (1964).1 Along with their mutual friend Edward Shils, Stern lobbied to bring Bellow to UChicago on a permanent basis; eventually, in 1962, Bellow accepted a position on the Committee on Social Thought, "something of an academic salon des refuses," Leader writes, and therefore a "better fit for him than the English Department" (Life, vol. 1, 615). Another of Bellow's biographers, Mark Harris, observes that Stern was "sober, reliable, immensely learned," and became "a friend of Bellow's stable side" once they were both settled in Hyde Park (36–37). The two writers offered "each other criticism and counsel in their trials and dilemmas," Bellow telephoning "the Sterns' house four or five times a day" (40). [End Page 266] On the afternoon that Bellow came to address Stern's writing class, in the fall of '56, the story to be discussed was not, as usual, that of a student, but of a young instructor on the English faculty, Philip Roth. Roth was just beginning to get his short stories published in university literary journals, but the piece Stern picked for the Bellow class had, Roth recalled, "been turned down by all the classy reviews" (qtd. in Pierpont 30). Roth sat quietly at the back of the room while Bellow, Stern, and the rest of the class workshopped "The Conversion of the Jews," which would appear in the Paris Review the following March before becoming part of Roth's National Book Award-winning first collection, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Only after the class did Stern introduce the young writer to the famous novelist, a meeting that Roth would fictionalize in The Ghost Writer (1979).2 Bellow's support was a great boost to Roth's fledgling career—editions of Goodbye, Columbus still carry on their cover the opening line of Bellow's glowing and influential Commentary review—and the two gradually became friends.3 But it was Stern's early encouragement, and particularly his amusement at Roth's comic storytelling over their regular hamburger lunches together in Chicago, that may have been more important in guiding Roth's youthful ambition. "I wanted to be deep like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write literature," Roth recalls, in a tribute to Stern after his death in 2013. "Instead I took Dick's advice and wrote Goodbye, Columbus. I would remain responsive to his literary wisdom forever after and would put before him, for him to challenge with his considerable critical vigor, the final draft of virtually all that I wrote" (Roth, "In Memory of Richard Stern"). The pair swapped manuscripts for forty years, commenting, often with ruthless honesty, upon each other's work; "we're so close that he reads my temperature from the progress of the manuscript," Stern said (Atlas 32). In their correspondence, Roth repeatedly quoted a favorite line from Blake that seemed to sum up their relationship: "Opposition is true friendship" (Roth, Letter to...

The Loss of Self and Identity Crisis in Jewish American Literature: The Case of Bernard Malamud’s The German Refugee

The search for identity and self-identity problems have been one of the pivotal themes for Jewish American authors. Prominent writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth explore American Jewish identity and address the questions of assimilation, the hardship of immigrant life, challenges of cultural acceptance, and finding purpose in life. In particular they are concerned with the self-identification and alienation of American Jewry. The given paper examines the problems of personality crisis and loss of identity portrayed in Bernard Malamud’s story “The German Refugee”. The psychological aspects of the main character’s personality are investigated, an attempt is made to analyze the factors that determined the crisis, which ultimately led him to suicide. The author also touches upon the topic of the post-Holocaust consciousness in Jewish American literature. Despite the fact that Malamud did not address the Holocaust theme in his works directly, he, like many post-war American fiction writers, was deeply impacted by it. The importance of Malamud's writing for Holocaust literature lies in his realistic portrayal of how the Shoah continues to affect survivors, refugees and those Jews who were not physically affected by it.

Neopicaresque, Jewish Humor and Denunciation of Cosmopolitanism in Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

The neopicaresque novel is a nascent genre that was invigorated in the aftermath of World Wars I and II in Britain and the United States. Contemporary studies of neopicaresque depict the image of the picaro as the “alienated”, “the outcast” and the “rebellious” character. This study is an attempt to redefine the Jewish neopicaresque novel and proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitanism are indispensable aspects that need further investigation. It endeavors through these two aspects to comment on the Jewish exilic experience in cosmopolitan America. Further, the study proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitism unearth the inability of the ghetto-minded Jewish immigrant to fathom the traumatic and rapid social and political vicissitudes that lead him to escape this chaotic life. These propositions are expounded through a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man who Disappeared (1914) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953). These Jewish travel narratives are discussed as Jewish neopicaresque novels that demonstrate the exodus of Eastern Jewish immigrants to America in the aftermath of WWI and II. The study draws on Freudian psychoanalytic theory of Jewish “self-critical “and “self-deprecating” humor. Considerations of the cultural dilemma of the Jewish ghetto immigrant and his negative depictions as “the wanderer Jew” and the “displaced-person” are addressed from the critical perspective of contemporary cosmopolitan discourses of Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman and Ulrich Beck. Keywords: Jewish neopicaresque novel, Jewish humor, cosmopolitanism, Kafka’s Amerika, Soul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

<i>Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism</i>. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

Memory as Imagination: Mind Science in Bellow's Short Fiction

Abstract This article analyzes the narrative memories in Saul Bellow's short fiction using a cognitive approach. Memory failures, memory distortions, emotional memories, and some other problems with memories in the stories are confronted through a lens that memory researchers call “mental time travel” or memory-imagination cognitive system. This article argues that Bellow's narrative styles and techniques of mind presentation in the second half of the twentieth century are consistent with twenty-first century science of the brain and mind, especially in terms of default mode cognitive activities and the imaginativeness of memory. For a clear presentation of the flawed narrative memories depicted in Bellow's short fiction, this article draws upon Daniel L. Schacter's metaphor of “sins of memory” when analyzing the texts from four stories. The application of Schacter's research in the textual analysis differentiates the psychological and neurobiological causes of errors in both memories and narrative memories, with a hope to contribute to the dialogue between literature and science in terms of the nature of narrative and memory.

ДЕЯКІ КУЛЬТУРНО-ІСТОРИЧНІ АСПЕКТИ САМОІДЕНТИФІКАЦІЇ ОСОБИСТОСТІ «ІНТЕЛЕКТУАЛІВ» У ТВОРАХ ДРУГОЇ ПОЛОВИНИ ХХ СТОЛІТТЯ

У статті в історико-культурологічному аспекті крізь призму особистостей письменників розглядається проблема самоідентифікації особистості «людини-інтелектуала», подається художній аналіз деяких літературних творів ІІ пол. ХХ ст. у рамках загальної естетичної та етичної картини світу. На тлі домінування зосередженості головних героїв на своєму внутрішньому світі визначаються шляхи осмислення, самоідентифікації та «переродження» особистостей «інтелектуалів» у нових реаліях. У дослідженні розглянутий творчий доробок північноамериканських письменників Сола Беллоу, Джона Уільямса, Пета Корнея, Остіна Райта та радянських майстрів слова Василя Гроссмана, Анатолія Рибакова, Андрія Вознесенського. Кожен з них по-своєму дає аналіз історико-культурних реалій, розставляє відповідні акценти. Різниться івплив літературної спадщини кожного на сучасність.&#x0D; На прикладі представлених творів цих авторів демонструється проблематика пошуку самоідентифікації особистості. Маркерами ідентифікації виступають національні, естетичні та моральні ознаки літературних персонажів. Досліджується вплив життєвих колізій на підвищення рівня самоусвідомлення. У статті побіжно наводяться спільні та відмінні фактори впливу на зображальні можливості в залежності від культурно-історичного контексту. Особлива увага надається внутрішній динаміці роздумів ліричних героїв, позитивних і негативних факторів постійної рефлексії. Розглядаються питання протидії тоталітаризму, збереження внутрішнього простору за умов ідеологічного тиску. Продемонстровано, що кожний ліричний герой має унікальний набір випробувань. Окремо увага надається попереднім спробам осмислити людське буття з точки зору самоаналізу.&#x0D; Розглядається проблема історизму та його специфіки в романах письменників ХХ ст., найважливішою складовою художнього світу яких стає відтворення інтелектуальної, політичної суті епохи, яка формує певну психологію і філософські позиції героїв. При цьому історичний фон складається не тільки з характерних прикмет побуту і звичаїв часу, але й історичних подій.&#x0D; Ключові слова: інтелектуал, особистість, самоосмислення, усвідомлення, самоідентифікація особистості.

Saul Bellow's Coma: What Neuroscience Can Learn From the Humanities.

Saul Bellow's Coma: What Neuroscience Can Learn From the Humanities.

Saul Bellow: Mastery in handling humour and parody

Humour in Bellow's prose is both rich and complex and it could not express better than it did, the author's propensity for self-analysis and self-scrutinizing heroes. The purpose of this paper is to highlight Bellow's mastery in handling his humour and presenting episodes that are both grotesque and absurd in some of his best novels, such as “Henderson, the Rain King”, “Herzog”, “Humboldt's Gift”, “Mr. Sammler's Planet” and “The Dean's December”. The association of the various types of humoristic touches of his novels to the potential effects and functions they play in them remain within the scope of the present paper.

Jewish Life as the Main Theme of Saul Bellow’s Novels

As the most influential contemporary American literary figure, Saul Bellow is the true picture of confusion and spiritual emptiness of western society. He, in his literary career, wrote a large number of novels, which won several awards including ‘Nobel Prize’. In his novels, Bellow explores modern living condition. He depicts urban intellectuals, especially the plight of American-Jewish intellectuals and is concerned about the real need and aspirations of the modern man.

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 by Zachary Leader

Reviewed by: The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 by Zachary Leader Donald Weber (bio) The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 By Zachary Leader. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. 767 pp. "The ideal biographer would be a fine artisan." So remarked Saul Bellow in a 1994 interview, when asked, as he approached eighty, how he would want his life story as America's foremost living novelist to be transcribed and assessed. Bellow added a cautionary note: "I think that living biographies are a mistake."1 Thanks to Zachary Leader's superb and surely definitive two-volume The Life of Saul Bellow, which together comes in at over 1,500 pages of richly detailed biographical narrative, shrewd literary criticism, and authoritative cultural analysis chronicling Bellow's long career in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we learn that Bellow was speaking from annoyed and characteristically anxious personal experience. At the time Bellow was worrying about James Atlas's biography-in-progress, which Bellow ultimately deemed—also characteristically—an act of betrayal; indeed, he anticipated the publication of Atlas's Bellow: A Biography (Modern Library, 2000) with shame and dread. Leader recuperates in fascinating detail Atlas's own psychologically charged relation to his subject. It turns out that he was not alone in fixating on Bellow. Well before Bellow achieved tremendous "fame and fortune" after the publication of the best-selling novel Herzog (1964)—the career-transforming event where Leader ends the first volume of the biography—Bellow had always attracted readers who identified with his obsessive first-person narrators, alert, intent "noticers" of the human quirks and "kinks" jutting out from the behavioral landscape. ("Taking note is part of my job description," explains Bellow's stand-in Chick, the narrator of Bellow's final novel, Ravelstein [2000].) "I've got my hands full with major lunatics" (316), he reported to one such overactive admirer at [End Page 307] the height of his post-Nobel Prize (1976) fame. Moved by the antic edges of humanity on display all around him, Bellow organized his letter files with categories variously labeled "abuse," "unstable correspondents," "problem mail," or, simply, "nuts" (316). (Most famously, the African American writer and Times editorial page editor Brent Staples followed Bellow around his toney Chicago neighborhood in the 1970s and then in his memoir Parallel Time wrote about his own curious habit of stalking, much to Bellow's chagrin.) For Leader, even a previous biographer's relation, however vexed, to his "living" subject deepens our understanding of what Leader calls Bellow's habitual "intensity," along with "his capacity to instill fear" (158). Looking back after Bellow's death in 2005, Atlas, who passed away in 2019, sensed that his fraught relation to his literary hero (including projections of Bellow as a surrogate father figure) ultimately had, in Leader's assessment, "a deforming effect." "Somehow knowing him," Atlas came to realize in Leader's view, "was proving a hindrance to understanding him" (605). "To write a biography of Saul Bellow," Atlas recognized, "would be, in a sense, to write my own autobiography, a generation removed" (401). No such deforming psychodramas hinder Leader from getting to the core of his complex subject. Indeed, Leader's great advantage in conjuring the figure of Bellow in The Life of Saul Bellow is that he did not know Bellow personally (except for a brief encounter while a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s). In this respect, Leader is Bellow's "ideal biographer," "a fine artisan," artfully weaving materials from the Bellow archives (letters, memoirs, fiction manuscripts recently made available at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago); incorporating interviews with scores of Bellow's friends, family, and ex-girlfriends; and drawing on journals kept by Bellow's fifth wife, Janis Freedman, recounting Bellow's final years teaching at Boston University and his struggle to keep writing in their beloved West Brattleboro home, what Bellow called "the good place." Leader's comprehensive knowledge of Bellow's life is thus on display on every page. Among the tonic subjects/themes that shape Bellow's [End Page 308] career: Bellow's notorious prickliness ("Bellow was rarely...

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner Ross Posnock John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00. “Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose. The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...

Madness and the Alienation of Intellectuals in Saul Bellow’s World of Fiction

This paper crystallizes how and why Bellow&amp;rsquo;s intellectual heroes in his later novels are men of ideas, dissenters and revolutionists of the age, though marginalized, victimized, degraded, disregarded, and forgotten in spite of their celebrity and contributions to American culture. The reason behind this partly exists in their being idealists, men of imagination and letters and partly because of the spoilt capitalistic American culture. Herzog satirizes the norms of the masses, and ironically and sympathetically is mocked by Bellow himself for his being too utopian. Henderson, Sammler and Humboldt sketch the decline of humanism and the agony of the intellectual. Corde illustrates this humanistic fall through the crisis of the communist system in Romania. Because of this cultural backdrop, American intellectuals are destined to suffer, feel agony and alienation. Here Bellow suggests subversion and deconstruction to the norms of his society. More strikingly, he adopts the strategy of being &amp;lsquo;forever en route,&amp;rsquo; forever re-evaluating one&amp;rsquo;s beliefs and ideals. The madness of his heroes is only a moment wisdom and over consciousness about the necessity of replacing the culture of masses and capitalism. Deeply behind this, Bellow maintains that the promises of the Enlightenment morality&amp;mdash;freedom, faith, happiness, altruism, reason, wisdom, humanism, self-autonomy and harmony&amp;mdash;have surprisingly turned into their opposites, and have been supplanted by new terms of utilitarian, nihilist, &amp;lsquo;irrational&amp;rsquo; discipline characterized by amorality, illusion, risk and the crisis of knowledge.

Darkness at Noon: Le Malheur of Capitalism in Bellow’s Later Novels

The crisis of capitalism, or what Saul Bellow dubs &amp;ldquo;the crisis of knowledge&amp;rdquo;, crystallizes the way he deconstructs and subverts the roots of modern American culture. The concepts of &amp;ldquo;darkness&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;Malheur&amp;rdquo; embody the tragic fate of capitalism and the end of history to recall Baudrillard and Fukuyama. Colin Davis relates this intellectual atmosphere to Lyotard&amp;rsquo;s theory of &amp;ldquo;after knowledge&amp;rdquo; and the postmodern condition, L&amp;eacute;vinas&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;after ethics&amp;rdquo; and Althusser&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;after hope&amp;rdquo;. Fictionally, Bellow epitomizes this cultural backdrop in modern America by addressing the decline of civility, the agony of the artist, the end of humanism and morality in a society which is dominated by the crowd of low culture to cite Williams. Conceding that the novelist identifies &amp;ldquo;darkness&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;noon&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;Malheur&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;capitalism&amp;rdquo; with Derrida&amp;rsquo;s premises of deconstruction and Foucault&amp;rsquo;s insights about episteme theory and the archeology of knowledge, it becomes then fundamental to underpin how he gives theory and philosophy an overriding role in the purification of humanism from the burden of materialism and capitalistic democracy. Special focus is on Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler&amp;rsquo;s Planet (1970), Humboldt&amp;rsquo;s Gift (1975) and The Dean&amp;rsquo;s December (1982) as they illustrate Bellow&amp;rsquo;s gestures of deconstructing the negativity of capitalism.

Sigmund Freud’s Psychic Apparatus Theory: A Study of the Protagonist in Saul Bellow’s Novel ‘Herzog’

“Psychology is the scientific study of the behaviour of humans..... The term ‘behaviour’ refers to both covert observable actions and covert observable mental processes and states such as perception, thought, reasoning, problem-solving, emotions and feelings (Encyclopaedia Britannica, P. 470) If the field of psychology is to study the mental processes and activities, art and literature give verbal expression to those mental and psychic processes. Sigmund Freud’s Psychic theories have encouraged the literary artists to probe deeper into human psyche and thereby presenting the ideas, ideals, thoughts and feelings which are of human interest and universal significance. The present article aims to highlight how the Sigmund Freud’s Psychic apparatus (Id, Ego and Super-ego) exercise a controlling and dominating influence on the personality, behaviour and character of the Protagonist Moses E. Herzog, depicted and portrayed by Saul Bellow, in his best known novel ‘Herzog.’

Tale Of A Pariah: Zoroastrian Worldview In Cyrus Mistry’s Chronicle Of A Corpse Bearer

The contribution of Parsee writers to the corpus of postcolonial discourse is singular. They are akin to the Jewish writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud who sought to express their ethnic identity in artistic terms. The Zoroastrian worldview, which is life – affirming, provides sustenance to the Parsee community. The Parsee system of the disposal of the dead is unique. This paper attempts to study Cyrus Mistry`s novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer which deals with the trauma of a nussesalar, a corpse bearer. Phiroze, the centre of consciousness represents the khandhias, the ostracized among the marginalized Parsee community. His tale gives us a peep into the abysmal and turbulent psyche of the khandhias. It is the account of a pariah who rejects the Zoroastrian worldview and leads a life of his volition.