Language, Literature and Education: Research Updates Vol. 11

This paper examines the intricate interplay between ideology, philosophy, and aesthetics in Saul Bellow’s fiction, revealing how his humanist aspirations are persistently undermined by the ideological pressures of modernity and late capitalism. Through close readings of Humboldt’s Gift, Herzog, Mr Sammler’s Planet, and Ravelstein, the study exposes Bellow’s oscillation between moral idealism and material complicity—an intellectual tension that reflects the crisis of meaning in post-Enlightenment thought. Drawing upon the philosophical frameworks of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, and Habermas, the paper argues that Bellow’s fusion of philosophical reflection and literary narrative both enriches and destabilises his art, blurring disciplinary boundaries between fiction, history, and theory. Ultimately, Bellow’s world of fiction emerges as a site where the contradictions of Western humanism are laid bare—a poetics of ideology that mirrors the fractured consciousness of the modern age.