“Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people.” This is the first line of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, a book about the oddities of the human condition, what it might mean to be a benefactor of humanity, and whether human life is rightly defined as tragic or comic. University professor Abe Ravelstein, a character based on Bellow’s close friend and philosopher Allan Bloom, strikes it rich by writing a controversial book called Souls Without Longing, which becomes an unexpected hit. In light of Ravelstein’s impending death, he tasks his friend Chick, a novelist, with “writing him up.”

Ravelstein is the story of Chick’s attempt to write a Life of Ravelstein, which, in the writing, also becomes a Life of Chick. Bellow, in other words, is a modern Plutarch, presenting the parallel lives of two noble Americans for our consideration and edification. But Ravelstein is also the rare novel that succeeds in depicting friendship, and as such is brimming with conversations about the most essential human things—faith and reason, love and friendship, poetry and philosophy—which will also become our topics of conversation in this seminar.

Matthew Dinan on Ravelstein

Faculty

Matthew Dinan

Matthew Dinan is an Associate Professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He does research on Ancient Greek, Christian, and 19th and 20th Century Political Philosophy.

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