Abstract: Disputable as it is, the notable Ravelstein by Saul Bellow is certainly the biography of the well-known political philosophy professor Allan Bloom. Starting from the word “odd”, Bellow represents a complete, rich and true-to-life image of his good friend beginning first from the private aspect of his body and sex, and then to the public domains of politics and philosophy until the most serious problem of death. This order of biographical narration follows the natural order of human nature, which is emphasized by Bloom. Nevertheless, the inner dialogue between Bellow the biographer and Bloom the subject is also implied in this work, which can be treated as the modern performance of the classical debate of “Poetry and Philosophy”, and it is just this character that embeds the book in the great chain of the history of Western thought.

Keywords: Allan Bloom, philosophical biography, eros, nature

Liang Qingbiao is Associate Professor of Literature at Jiangxi Normal University, China. His research concerns life writing and literary education studies. He is the author of “‘Original Sin’ or ‘Legal Prejudice’: Current Western Debates on Autobiography.” (Foreign Literatures, 2 2017)

E-mail: qbliang@163.com