Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Saul Bellow As A Novelist Of Ideas: Introduction To The Forum, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales
Saul Bellow As A Novelist Of Ideas: Introduction To The Forum, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales
English Faculty Research
On the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Saul Bellow asked, “What is at the center now?” (2015a: 299). This question gets at the heart of a lifetime of literary attempts to find “the center,” to expose the core of what it means to be human in the volatile, unstable, and explosive twentieth century. In defense of what, for Bellow, was the singular preoccupation of his lengthy and distinguished literary career, he insists that “[o]ut of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more …
Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons
Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has, as its frontispiece, two epigraphs that frame and set the stage for the fraught condition of its protagonist, Asa Leventhal, as he navigates a tortuous course through the physical and psychic landscape that threatens to be his undoing. The novel’s first epigraph narrates the brief but portentous “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a lone merchant, traveling on business and oppressed by the heat, takes shelter beneath a tree. There he breaks fast, relieving his weariness and his hunger with bread and dates. …