The Face of the Future: An Affective Mental Time Traveler in Saul Bellow’s “A Father-To-Be”
Abstract
This article focuses on a future-oriented Janus face portrayed in Saul Bellow's short story "A Father-to-Be," arguing that it builds an exceptional prospective fictional mind in Bellow's writing with a great emphasis on emotion. Drawing on the "Janus hypothesis," the article examines how the protagonist's emotional and imaginative mind interprets the past and processes the present based on a gloomy anticipation of the future, while some previous literary studies on the memory-imagination cognition emphasize the imaginativeness of memory. Affective narratology is largely involved as the supportive explanatory framework in the analysis of the narrative style. The authors approach the structure of the entire story by regarding it as an emotion story and attempt to reveal the aesthetic value of its core narrative by taking emotion both as the force of character forming and as rhetoric.
Recommended Citation
Tong, Y., & Shen, T. (2024). The Face of the Future: An Affective Mental Time Traveler in Saul Bellow’s “A Father-To-Be”. Style, 58(2), pp. 190-209. Penn State University Press.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.5325/style.58.2.0190
Department(s)
Psychological Science
Keywords and Phrases
affective narratology; emotion story; Janus hypothesis; Saul Bellow; "A Father-to-Be"
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
0039-4238
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2024 Penn State University Press, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2024
