Suffering is at the core of Jewish-American literature in general and in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok in particular. Bellow and Potok, affirmative writers who believe in man’s redemption through suffering, portray characters that evoke the Job-like “suffering man” whose endurance and faith in God are finally rewarded. “Schooling in grief,” a phrase borrowed from Bellow’s Herzog (1964), can also be applied to Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Potok’s The Chosen (1967). The paper reads these two novels with the notion of the I/It and I/Thou relationship as explained in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923). The characters in The Victim and The Chosen move from the I/It to the I/Thou encounter through suffering, which eventually leads towards mutual understanding and love for the other.

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has as its frontispiece two epigraphs: one from “The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, and the other from Thomas de Quincey’s The Pains of Opium. The epigraphs set the stage for Bellow’s protagonist’s anxious reflections about his responsibility toward his fellow sufferers, a moral condition which Asa Leventhal at first attempts to deny but to which he ultimately succumbs. These opening epigraphs — cautionary tales of accountability and moral reckoning — not only introduce the novel’s tensions and ambiguities but also frame the unraveling of Bellow’s fraught and apprehensive central character, whose anxieties about his accountability toward others threaten to become his undoing.

Saul Bellow’s fiction is decidedly philosophic, particularly as he celebrates depth of personhood in his characters while denigrating superficiality. The discursive action of this focus on personal depth involves the idea of soul, which, for Bellow, resonates in individual characters in his fiction as well as in the “character” of culture, usually viewed in historical decline, one of his preoccupations. This essay examines this dual understanding of soul — as a function of individual character and as the “character” of culture — in two of Bellow’s novels: Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000). Both are concerned with the tension between the grandeur of art and ideas and the depredations of rising commercial culture in America. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow offers an initial view of the messy genius of a great intellectual, while in Ravelstein the persona of a great intellectual is fully developed and even more explicitly presented in terms of the relation between such “greatness of soul” and cultural and intellectual decline in late-capitalism. In both novels, an aesthetic of great personhood works through characterization, with “greatness” revealing itself metonymically as aestheticized relational energy and in the genius for seeing revealed essences. In the characters of Von Humboldt Fleisher and Abe Ravelstein, characters based on two of Saul Bellow’s teachers and intellectual heroes, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom, Bellow explores a type of intellectual heroism, the loss of which, he believes, has severe, even catastrophic, cultural consequences.

In their book Kafka Deleuze and Guattari mention Samuel Beckett as a prime example of a minor writer. The article explores this insight about Beckett’s practice as a minor writer, focusing on his first novel published in French, Molloy (1951). It further inquires into the importance of multilingualism to the change in Beckett’s style after World War II and its connection with the transition from English to French.

In 2014 New Perspectives Theatre Company staged the first adaptation on the stage of a short story by Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” The changes made to the story in its adaptation for the stage inform our understanding of the comic effect of the story, particularly in relation to the different endings involved. The dynamic of the story depends upon the deployment of two different concepts of comedy — as the expression of an aggressive, materialistic society (Freud, The Joke in Relation to the Unconscious)  or as a means of reforming society in green comedy (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism). The story focusses upon the legitimate irresponsibility of comedy, and on the relation of comedy to freedom, defending it as a social and even a sacred good. The one-liners uttered by the hero exemplify comedy of a corrective nature, offering a healthy critique of social behavior, particularly in terms of the relation of art to money, and contest Freud’s theory as tainted by its social context and economic basis.

While scholars have offered independent readings of Philip Roth’s and Saul Bellow’s provocative representations of the Holocaust camp, I put Roth’s and other writers’ (Anthony Hecht’s, Carl Friedman’s, and Nathan Englander’s) handling of this topos in tension with Bellow in their search of ways to approach traumatic history. Without taking sides, I contend that the crisis in representation brought on by the age of genocide comes into focus more vividly through the defamiliarizing trope of the Holocaust camp as seen in more recent fiction than in Bellow’s more poetic, alienating novel.

According to UNESCO, a child is “ a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood younger” while childhood’s early years are said to be “decisive for human development.” This essay shows how childhood and children are depicted in two of Bellow's short stories, “By the St. Lawrence,” where a dying, elderly professor returns to his birthplace and sees himself as a child, and “Zetland’s : By a Character Witness,” where the treatment of childhood stages Bellow’s autobiographical memory of his relationship with Isaac Rosenfeld. Following Lewis Carroll’s structure, Bellow takes his adult characters down on a trip to the past childhood: his child characters are remembered; they continue to exist in the adult identity but are not represented in the fictional present; by contrast to child characters in Romantic literature, these children are not given a central position in these stories — they are remembered entities.

The defense of the human being’s individuality is a major issue that Saul Bellow (1915-2005) addresses throughout his literary career. Worried by the pernicious effects that modern civilization exerts over the individual’s inner self, in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and in The Dean’s December (1982) Bellow shows that the reconstruction of the inner self can only be accomplished through the imaginative mind or, in a romantic phrase, through the human being’s poetic genius.”

This essay explorea the significance of this issue in The Dean’s December in light of William Blake’s “Then She Bore Pale Desire,” “London,” and “The Chimney Sweeper”; W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Long-Legged Fly”; and P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and “England in 1819.” In a romantic manner, Bellow’s Albert Corde escapes from the city — a symbol of Blake’s “fallen world,” Yeats’s “dying generations” and “underclass,” and tyranny as expressed in Shelley’s sonnet — and, much like Bellow’s Augie March, Eugene Henderson, and Moses Herzog, ends up going to nature, epitomized by the Mt. Palomar observatory, in order to find his long-awaited peace of mind.

According to Saul Bellow (1915–2005), one of the main responsibilities of the novelist is to expose “the center” and to adjudicate among the many explanations, rationalizations, defenses, and subterfuges that constitute modern life. Bellow cautions against the “noise” of modern life because, he believes, it distracts one from the center, from the essence of human experience. Amidst the chaos of modern life, Bellow’s fiction — novels and short stories of contemplation and of meditated reflection — is a stay against confusion. The “Introduction to the Forum” establishes the context for a discussion of Bellow’s works and frames the issues raised in the individual articles in the Forum.

This paper argues that in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens provides an alternative to the dominant aesthetic paradigm of his time, organicism. While organic form implies unity in the many, dust in this novel offers an aesthetic of similitude in which the whole is nothing but the part replicated over and over. Through the use of recurrences and doubling, the novel comes to embody this aesthetic. Social formations in the novel similarly challenge organic form, as familial roles are empty shells that characters only temporarily inhabit. When Dickens departs from organic ideals of differentiation and progress, he challenges the liberal principle of individuation.

This essay examines the representation of philosophy in Yaakov Shabtai’s single completed novel, Past Continuous (1977). It argues that while Shabtai was evidently concerned with philosophy as an intellectual activity, and with the philosophizing intellectual as a social type, his novel — contrary to several influential interpretations — does not seek to impart a philosophical view. Rather, the novel’s close depiction of its characters’ intellectual preoccupations and obsessions is cautionary in intent: the novel does not offer an all-encompassing theory of life but warns its intellectual reader against the need to search for such a theory in the first place. The novel’s cautionary dimension affiliates it both with what Richard Rorty has described as the post-metaphysical tradition in twentieth-century thought — a mode of writing that he associates with the “therapeutic”works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey — and with the age-old literary genre of anti-philosophical satire, as practiced by Aristophanes, Voltaire, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. After situating Past Continuous in these contexts, the essay proceeds to discuss the social-historical background that informed the early reception of this work and influenced the prevalent critical tendency to read it as a philosophical novel.