Saul Bellow’s Cultural Construction Of The Intellectual Portrait In Herzog

As the most prestigious U.S. novelist after Faulkner and Hemingway, Saul Bellow is also listed among the top US contemporary writers and has won Nobel Prize in Literature and many other prizes. Bellow’s works feature largely in depicting human beings in pursuit of the essence of life and striving for understanding the society in the modern context while trapped in the predicament of spiritual crisis, rootlessness, and insufficient sense of identification. The intellectuals characterized as keen insight and sensitive mind in Bellow’s works are not but the typical characters that Bellow constructs for this predicament. In Bellow’s works, intellectuals’ function as the representatives of the modern people and their struggles against various modern predicament demonstrate Bellow’s humanitarian concerns. Herzog is the author’s major work and involves the greatest number of social problems. Bellow narrates a Jewish intellectual’s pursuit of the meaning of the life in the modern society, thus demonstrating the author’s understanding of the human existence as well as the influence of Jewism on the author.This thesis consists of the introduction, the main body, and the conclusion, while there are three aspects in the main body as follows.In the introductory part, the status quo of Saul Bellow studies in both China and abroad is summarized with the key concept of intellectual defined in it.The first chapter discusses the background and milieu of Saul Bellow and the internal and external contexts of Herzog and the creation of it. The second chapter explores the author’s cultural construction of the intellectual for Herzog from three aspects, namely, the spiritual exile, the absurd escapist from alienation, and rootless person in loss.The third chapter studies the construction of the intellectual of Herzog from the perspective of culture and society. In this chapter, the socio-cultural elements in Bellow’ s construction of intellectual is explored from three aspects, i.e. the implication on constructing independent identity and eliminating the mentality of paralysis in the modern society, the way of survival as reflected from the epitome of a conscientious social intellectual, and the implication on future trends of social values and development.The concluding part will elaborate on the social significance of the intellectual image of Herzog. Human beings should lead their life like conscientious intellectuals. They should adhere to justice and truth in face of power and eliminate the mentality of paralysis, so as to construct and maintain their independent cultural identity and build the home where they can achieve the sense of belonging.