A Study Of The Media Culture In Saul Bellow’s Late Novels

Saul Bellow was a famous contemporary American writer and a representative figure in the American literary history of the 20 th century.In his works,Bellow is committed to accurately portraying American social life from the second half of the20 th century to the beginning of the 21 st century.Take a look at Bellow’s novel creation cycle,we can find out that Bellow’s mid-and late-stage novels were focused on the description of current social life.In the novel,Bellow was keenly aware of the thoughts triggered by these cultural phenomena,and they all had a close relationship with the media.Thus the reproduction of the media and its culture was also an important content in his novels.Since the focus on media culture in Bellow’s novels were focused on the mid-and late-stage novels,this paper will select the representative works of the mid-and laterstage novels Mr.Sammler’s Planet,More People Die from Heartbreak,and Ravelstein,The Dean’s December and The Bellarosa Connection,based on the relationship between Bellow and the media,construct the mass political unconsciousness through the dissemination of the memory of the Holocaust and the video media.The cultural alternative experience of mass media creation and the influence of the media environment on social consciousness were introduced from four perspectives,and the media culture in Saul Bellow’s mid-and late-stage novels were analyzed from the four levels of memory,politics,culture and society.Carry out an overall analysis and explanation.The introduction part mainly elaborates the origin of the topic,a literature review,the significance,the objectives and the theoretical method of this thesis.The second chapter traces the relationship between Saul Bellow and the media from the influence of Bellow on the Chicago School during his studies,as well as his career experience as a war reporter and the background of his creation.Chapter three is concerned with the dissemination of memory of the Holocaust.From Bellow’s novels,the lack of selectivity of the American media in reporting on the incident and the media’s use of the memory of the Holocaust to construct the "American Dream".Finally,we discuss the media’s concealment and appearance of memory.The fourth chapter promotes the birth of opinion leaders through media images represented by television programs in the novel and analyzes the formation of virtual claustrophobia under the "harmonious landscape" of the media society.The image media can thus construct the public’s political unconsciousness and ultimately lead to a belief rupture for the audience.The fifth chapter analyzes the alternative experience created by the mass media in the field of art and knowledge culture from the cultural level,which let the audience to gradually lose the ability to perceive under the infiltration of the media,thus giving up the consciousness of participating in the real experience and finally result in a drowning in the “false satisfaction” and intellectual “pseudo-satisfaction”.Passive aesthetic experience leads to the collapse of cultural meaning.The sixth chapter starts from the perspective of media ecology,discusses Bellow’s novels from the perspectives of advertising and body consciousness in the media symbol environment,the construction of the ideal body,the elimination of Chicago morality in the semantic environment,and the influence of the perceived environment on the way of class mobility.From the above aspects,Bellow uses the rational thinking of a responsible writer and intellectual to explore the relationship between the media and modern American social life.It aims to reflect Bellow’s questioning and criticism of the value rationality and technical rationality represented by the mass media,and Bellow reveals the potential contradictions and consequences of the development of the supremacy of technical rationality.It is also a vigilance and criticism of the development of human society.