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Encyclopedia > Sacvan Bercovitch

Sacvan Bercovitch (b.1933) is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic. American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. ...

Contents

Education and academic career

Sacvan Bercovitch is perhaps the most influential and most controversial Americanist of his time. He has received the Distinguished Scholar Award for Extraordinary Lifetime Achievement in Early American Literature (2002), the Jay B. Hubbell Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies (2004), and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies ((2007). Born in Montreal, Quebec, on October 4, 1933, he received his B.A. at Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University (1958) and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University (1965). (He has since then received honorary degrees from both institutions: an LLD from Concordia in 1993 and an HLD from Claremont n 2005). Bercovitch taught at Brandeis University, the University of California-San Diego, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia University; from 1984 until his retirement in 2001 he taught at Harvard University, where he held the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature (the Chair formerly held by Perry Miller); he is now the Powell M. Cabot Research Professor at Harvard. Interspersed with these regular academic appointments Bercovitch has been a visiting faculty member at Princeton University, the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, the Bread Loaf School of English, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Rome. the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Chinese Academy of Social Studies in Beijing, the Kyoto University Seminar in Japan, and the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. ... Nickname: Motto: Concordia Salus (well-being through harmony) Coordinates: , Country Province Founded 1642 Established 1832 Government  - Mayor Gérald Tremblay Area [1][2][3]  - City 365. ... Concordia University is a large urban university in Montréal, Québec, Canada, one of Montréals two universities that teach primarily in the English language (the other being McGill University). ... Concordia University is a large urban university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, one of Montreals two universities that teach primarily in the English language (the other being McGill University). ... Claremont Graduate University (formerly The Claremont Graduate School) was founded in 1925 in the city of Claremont, California, as the only academic institution in North America to devote itself entirely to graduate study. ... {{Infobox_University |name = Claremont Graduate University |image = [[Image:]] |motto = |established = 1925 |type = Private |president = |city = Claremont |state = [[California |country = USA |grad = 2,033 |campus = Urban, 19 acres/ ha |mascot = |website= www. ... Usen Castle, the most recognized building on campus Brandeis University is a private university located in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. ... The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD) is a public, coeducational university located in La Jolla, California. ... Columbia University is a private research university in the United States and a member of the prestigious Ivy League. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... Cover of Millers Errand into the Wilderness Perry Miller (1905-1963) was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. ... Princeton University is a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. ... Dartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. ... Tel-Aviv University (TAU, אוניברסיטת תל-אביב) is one of Israels major universities. ... There is no institution called the University of Rome, but there are several universities in Rome: University of Rome La Sapienza University of Rome Tor Vergata University of Roma Tre This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The École Pratique des Hautes Études is a university in Paris, France. ...


Background and approach

Bercovitch writes from deep within the puzzlement that America has evoked in him, the mixture of admiration, astonishment, and resistance that is still connected, in him, to the peculiar conditions of his upbringing – to the Yiddishist left-wing immigrant world of his parents (he was named for the martyred anarchist immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti), to the foster homes of his adolescence, and to his experience as a member of a Socialist (Hashomer Hatzair) Israeli kibbutz. His attitude as an Americanist is captured in his description of his entry into the United States in the 60's, and first learning "about the prophetic history of America. Not of North America, for the prophecies stopped short at the Canadian and Mexican borders, but of a country that, despite its arbitrary territorial limits, could read its destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed -- and in face of a history of genocide, slavery, ethnic discrimination, class divisions, regional antagonisms, imperial aggression. and widespread violence -- could believe in something called the American dream or mission, and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest. I felt then like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes." [1] Bercovitch's later responses have been both more sceptical and (although he remains a self-declared "chronic cultural outsider") [2]far more engaged. This article is about the Italian comune. ... Nicola Sacco (right) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in handcuffs Nicola Sacco (April 22, 1891 – August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (June 11, 1888 – August 23, 1927) were two Italian-born American anarchists, who were arrested, tried, and executed via electrocution in Massachusetts. ... Kibbutz Dan, near Qiryat Shemona, in the Upper Galilee, 1990s A kibbutz (Hebrew: ; plural: kibbutzim: קיבוצים; gathering or together) is an Israeli collective intentional community. ...


Writing

Early work

Sacvan Bercovitch's early books, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad (along with his edited collections on typology and The American Puritan Imagination) presented a new interpretation of the structures of expression and feeling that composed the writing of Puritan New England. They proposed (1) the importance of scriptural typology in Puritan New England thought; (2) the centrality of the imagination in the New England Puritans' writings; (3) the relation between the imagination, religious belief, and ideology (in its anthropological as well as Neo-Marxist sense); (4) the centrality of the text, from the Pruritan view of scripture through the Declaration of Independence, in the process of communal self-defintion; and, from all four perspectives, (5) an understanding of the origins in New England Puritanism of a distinctive mode of expression and belief -- a distinctive symbology, at once deeply religious and broadly political -- that eventuated in the "American" identity. The result was a model of cultural continuity. Bercovitch saw the Puritan "errand" as a proto-capitalist venture that offered a singularly compelling rationale for an expanding modern community. What made it compelling was not just its religious emphasis; it was the crucial reversal, or inversion, this effected in the Puritans' secular concept of mission. Whereas other colonists -- in New France, New Spain, New Amsterdam -- understood themselves to be emissaries of European empire, the New England Puritans repudiated the "Old World." Instead, they centered their imperial enterprise on the meaning they read inrto their "New World": "America" as the new promised land -- which was to say, the promised land of the new modern world -- a sacred-secular symbol that (in altered forms) nourished the rhetoric of a new nation, the United States as "America." The consensus this established was rhetorical, opening into a system of rituals and beliefs. It was not a description of realities in the United States (which often differed substantially from those beliefs); rather, it was was the rhetorical-ideological construction of a new identity. As a leading literary theorist noted (in commenting on The American Jeremiad), Bercovitch's work "should make it impossible for anyone to use easily the word America." [3] The word typology literally means the study of types. ... Neo-Marxism was a 20th century school that harked back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of Engels which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism, and thus rejected the economic determinism of early Marx, focusing instead on a non-physical, psychological revolution. ...


Later work

Through his exploration, then, of the expressive culture of Puritan New England, Bercovitch moved forward, into the nineteenth and twetieth centuries, toward a description of a distinctive American ideology. That ambition yielded his major books of the nineties, The Office of "The Scarlet Letter" and The Rites of Assent (as well as his edited collections on literary history and Ideology and Classic American Literature), which in effect complete the writing of the history of American liberal-capitalist culture begun in the earlier work--a history that provocatively specifies how, in the United States, acts of withering dissent are put to the service of a vision of consensus. More largely, he has argued that the strategy of American pluralism is precisely to elicit dissent -- political, intellectual, aesthetic, academic -- in order to redirect it into an affirmation of American ideals. However, Bercovitch has qualified that anaysis (his "hermeneutics of suspicion") in a series of essays on individual authors, from Melville to Twain, acknowledging, on the one hand, the "modes of basic resistance to ideology" within democratic liberalism [4] and, on the other hand, pointing out the energizing utopian qualities in American ideals: "We need think no less of Chaucer for his commitment to the 'medieval world view'; we may actually praise his culture for having provided with so rich a a system of ideas, symbols, and beliefs. So too with Whitman and Emerson: they need not embarrass us by their failure, if such it was, to see through the rhetoric of free-enterprise democracy. What they did see, when they plumbed the emotional and conceptual ground of the rhetoric, was profound, humane, and exhilarating, a set of beliefs and principles which may rank among the most liberating ... [ideals] produced by any culture, past or present." [5] In 2004, Bercovitch completed a 20-year project as General Editor of the multi-volume Cambridge History of American Literature, which has been called "without a doubt, and without a serious rival, the scholarly history of our generation." [6] This article is about the 1850 book. ... Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. ... Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. ... Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. ... Emerson may refer to: Emerson Radio Emerson (surname), a human family name generally given as the last name, and a list of individuals with that name. ...


Criticism and Controversy

It has been suggested that some of the information in this article's "Criticism" or "Controversy" section(s) be merged into other sections to achieve a more neutral presentation. (see talk)

EARLY WORK


Bercovitch's first writings competed with Perry Miller's foundational synthesis of "the New England Mind," and Bercovitch was charged with having failed to see "in Puritan books . . . their capacity to instruct, their power 'to open the heart and educate the soul'" [7]. His following work, connecting aesthetics and religious typology and historical-cultural issues, competed with the formalist theories of the then-regant New Criticism and Bercovitch was reproached for his "indictments of American imaginative power." [8] Furthermore, Bercovitch's view of the consensus-making powers of "the myth of America" -- his concept of "America" as a rhetorical construct, with extraordinary capacities for sustaining the culture through periods of crisis and change (the visionary "America" as a source of social cohesion) -- was attacked politically from both the right and the left. From the right, he was decried as the central figure of an upstart generation of "New Americanists." [9] From the left, he was criticized for analyzing the culture from within and so "replicating its dominant forms," rather than offering a "new politics." [10] Bercovitch has never replied directly to his critics. But he has celebrated Perry Miller's "towering achievement" ;[11] he has edited numerous Puritan texts [12] and taught Puritan thought and theology to several generations of students; he has repeatedly emphasized the aesthetic dimension of cultural inquiry along with the importance of the literary in social and cultural analysis, [13]and he has explored the "paradoxes of dissent" that "issued in a fundamental challenge to the system: racism subverted in the story of a self-made man (Frederick Douglass); patriarchy subverted through a revised version of the Declaration of Independence (Elizabeth Cady Stanton); the authority of government subverted by a Fourth of July experiment in self-reliance. (Henry David Thoreau)" [14] New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ... Frederick Douglass, ca. ... Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American social activist and leading figure of the early womens rights movement. ... Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau[1]) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and philosopher who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance...


LATER WORK


The paradox of dissent that Bercovitch formulated in his early work is that protest in America often issues in what he has called "containment" -- meaning both contained within the cultue's liberal norms and ideals and containing a decided uptoipian potential for subversion of those norms or extension of those ideals. [15] Bercovitch's critics have charged him accordinglly as being an "exceptionalist," and specifically, the author of a "powerful version of American exceptionalism."[16] Indeerd, this charge has become the leading challenge to Bercovitch's work over the past two decades. The fact is, however, that Bercovitch's "version of exceptionalism" marks a sharp break with that tradition. The concept of American exceptionalism runs from Karl Marx through the founders of American Studies. It posits, from various perspectives, that the Unites States is unique, unlike any other nation, past or present. Bercovitch emphasizes instead a pervasive rhetoric of American identity (one that usurped the very name "America" for the United States). The strategies of consensus, as he describes them, are are grounded in the liberal foundations of many modern nations, and he notes that the history of the United States, far from being exceptional, is a history much like that of many major powers, modern and premodern: a history of injustice, oppression, imperial expansion, racial and ethnic discrimination, and violence in all these aspects. [17] What remains distinctive nonetheless -- distinctive, not unique -- is the national belief in its own exceptionalism, what Bercovitch has defined as "the American Ideology" ( ideology conceived here in the anthropological sense). [18]


Contribution

Bercovitch's work, which has been translated in many languages -- French, German, Chinese, Italian, Hungarian, and others -- redirected the study of Early American Literature and marked a new, historicist turn in American literary and cultural criticism. It is characterized by large historical claims and bold intellectual syntheses; it is intensely scholarly in certain traditional ways; it is often focussed on close textual reading; and it is broadly theoretical in its implications, from his early essays on typology to his later essays on ideology and on questions related to inter-interdiscipline. In the assessment of a recent literary historian, Bercovitch's "audacious writings signaled an important shift in the understanding of culture that has remained influential. After Bercovitch, culture no longer seems . . . the disinterested location for abstract reflection, but rather the place in which American power pervasively resides. . . . Animated by this insight, Bercovitch transformed [the standard views of] the 'classic' writers . . . enshrined by American Studies" -- a transformation "suggestive of new interpretive energies" and "compelling revisions of [traditional] categories and assumptions." [19]In one of his citations for lifetime achievement, " Bercovitch has been the foremost interpreter of early American literature for his generation and probably of several generations." [20] The Hubbell Prize Committee commended Bercovitch for his "transformative effect on the practice of American literary scholarship." [21]


Fellowships and honors

Bercovitch has held fellowships in residence at the Yale Center for American Studies; the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the American Antiquarian Society, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Huntington Library; he has won fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; he has represented the Fulbright Scholar Program in Europe (Prague, Moscow, Warsaw, Coimbra. Portugal, and elsewhere) and has been been a distinguished lecturer and keynote speaker at countless universities, colleges, and conferences throughout the the world; he has served on a wide array of professional advisory boards, editorial boards, fellowship panels and committees; and he has won awards for both teaching and scholarship, among them the Brandeis Award for Excellency in Teaching (1967), the Cabot Award for Achievement in the Humanities (1991), and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Languages Association for the best scholarly book (1992). He has served as President of the American Studies Association (1982-1984), and in 1986 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Modern Languages Association (2002,2004) and from the American Studies Association (2007). In recent years he has returned to his early interests in Jewish Studies (he has translated Sholom Aleichem and other Yiddish writers) and received an Emeritus Professor Grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project on “The Ashkenazi Renaissance, 1880-1940." The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is both a learned society and national research library of pre-twentieth century American History and culture. ... The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or Wilson Center) was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by act of Congress in 1968. ... The Huntington Library is an educational and research institution established by Henry Huntington in San Marino, California. ... The Ford Foundation is a charitable foundation based in New York City created to fund programs that promote democracy, reduce poverty, promote international understanding, and advance human achievement. ... The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation funds the Guggenheim Museums. ... The American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919, is a private non-profit federation of sixty-eight scholarly organizations. ... The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 (Pub. ... The House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Sholem Aleichem ‎, Russian: ; March 2 [O.S. February 18] 1859 – May 13, 1916) was a popular humorist and Russian (geographically, Ukrainian) Jewish author of Yiddish literature, including novels, short stories, and plays. ... Yiddish (Yid. ... The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a foundation endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon. ...


Teaching

Bercovitch has been a popular teacher on both the undergraduate and the graduate levels; his students now occupy prominent positions at universities and colleges from Yale to UCLA, and from Beijing to Oxford, Tel Aviv, and Rome. In a tribute, one former student wrote: "The example of scholarly rigor, searching curiosity, and untendentious inquiry that Bercovitch has presented has been widely influential, nowhere more clearly than in the work of the many graduate students he has supervised over the years. On the occasion of his retirement, Harvard University hosted a conference in his honor, featuring as speakers a selection of his doctoral students from Columbia and Harvard. “The Next Turn in American Literary and Cultural Studies,” as the conference was called, was notable for many reasons, but perhaps most conspicuously for the variety and distinction of the scholarly and critical work Bercovitch has sponsored: while there have been mechanically Bercovitchean essays and books published in the wake of his own, Bercovitch’s students have learned precisely not to mimic his work but to reproduce, as well as they can, his independence of mind and unpredictability of argument. It is this outcome that honors him most truly." [22] YALE (Yet Another Learning Environment) is an environment for machine learning experiments and data mining. ... Binomial name Ucla xenogrammus Holleman, 1993 The largemouth triplefin, Ucla xenogrammus, is a fish of the family Tripterygiidae and only member of the genus Ucla, found in the Pacific Ocean from Viet Nam, the Philippines, Palau and the Caroline Islands to Papua New Guinea, Australia (including Christmas Island), and the... Beijing (Chinese: 北京; pinyin: BÄ›ijÄ«ng; Wade-Giles: Peiching or Pei-ching; IPA: ; literally Northern capital;  ), a metropolis in northern China, is the capital of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ... Oxford is a city and local government district in Oxfordshire, England, with a population of 134,248 (2001 census). ... Tel-Aviv was founded on empty dunes north of the existing city of Jaffa. ... Nickname: Motto: SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus Location of the city of Rome (yellow) within the Province of Rome (red) and region of Lazio (grey) Coordinates: Region Lazio Province Province of Rome Founded 21 April 753 BC Government  - Mayor Walter Veltroni Area  - City 1,285 km²  (580 sq mi)  - Urban 5...


Selected bibliography

Writer

  • The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 1975: Yale University Press, New Haven and London; Second Printing, 1976; Paperback edition, 1977. ISBN 0300021178
Reprinted in part in Social and Political Thought: A Reader, ed. Andreas Hess. 2002: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0814736572
  • The American Jeremiad, 1978: University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Paperback edition, 1980; 2nd edition, 1989. ISBN 0299073548
  • The Office of "The Scarlet Letter", 1991: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Paperback edition, 1993. ISBN 080184584X
Reprinted in part in “The Scarlet Letter”: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1991); American Literature, American Culture, ed. Gordon Hutner (Oxford University Press: New York, 1999); “The Scarlet Letter,” ed. Paul Lauter (Houghton Mifflin: New York, 2002); and The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, ed. Leland S. Person (Norton: New York, 2005), pp. 576-597
  • The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, 1993: Routledge, New York and London, Paperback edition, 1993. Chinese translation, 2005. ISBN 0415900158

Editor

  • Typology and Early American Literature, 1972: University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Introduction, pp. 5-10; bibliography, pp. 124-246
  • The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, 1974: Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge. Introduction and Bibliography, pp. 1-16, 212-216. Reprinted, 2004. ISBN 0521098416
  • Reconstructing American Literary History (Harvard English Studies, vol. 13), 1986: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Introduction, pp. ix-xii ISBN 0735102287
  • Ideology and Classic American Literature (with Myra Jehlen), 1986: Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge. Afterword, pp. 418-447.
  • Cambridge History of American Literature, 8 vols, 1986-2004: Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge; Chinese translation, 2007.

Nathanael West (October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was the pen name of US author, screenwriter and satirist Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein. ... Volumes in the Library of America series The Library of America (LoA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. ...

Chapters/sections of books

  • "Romance and Anti Romance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," in Critical Studies of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", ed. Donald R. Howard and C.K. Zoker, 1968: University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, pp. 257-266.
  • "Horologicals to Chronometricals: The Rhetoric of the Jeremiad," ed. Eric Rothstein, 1970: Literary Monographs, No. 3, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 1-124, 187-215.
  • "Cotton Mather," in Major Writers of Early American Literature, ed. Everett Emerson, 1972: University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 93-150.
  • "Emerson the Prophet: Puritanism, Romanticism, and Auto American Biography," in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. David Levin, 1975: Columbia University Press, New York and London, pp.1- 27; reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom. 1985: Chelsea Press, pp. 29-44
  • "New England's Errand Reappraised," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul Conkin, 1979: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 85-105.
  • "Fusion and Fragmentation: The American Identity," in The American Identity: Fusion or Fragmentation ed. Rob Kroes, 1980: Dutch American Studies Association, Amsterdam, pp. 19-45.
  • "The Ideological Context of the American Renaissance," in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature, ed. Willi Paul Adams, Winfried Fluck, and Jorgen Peper, 1981: Berlin, pp. - 20.
  • "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," in The Bible and American Arts and Letters, ed. Giles Gunn, 1983: Fortress Press, Philadelphia, pp. 219-229
  • "The Modernity of American Puritan Rhetoric," in American Letters and the Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Louis P. Simpson, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel, 1987: Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, pp. 42-66.
  • "The Ends of American Puritan Rhetoric," in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbury, 1990: Stanford University Press, pp. 171-190.
  • "A Literary Approach to Cultural Studies," in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Garber, Paul B. Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 1996: Routledge, pp. 247-256.
  • “Games of Chess: A Model of Literary and Cultural Studies,” in Centuries Ends, Narrative Means, ed. Robert Newman, 1996: Stanford University Press, pp. 15-58, 319-329.
  • “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies,” in “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines, ed. John Carlos Rowe, 1998: Columbia University Press, pp. 69-87

In other languages

  • America Puritana, 1992: Editori Riuniti, Rome. Transl. Giuseppe Nori (a collection of essays on the Puritans).
  • 《惯于赞同》(Rites of Assent). 2005: Shanghai Translation Publishing Company, Shanghai. Transl. Mansu Qian.
  • 剑桥美国文学史 (Cambridge History of American Literature), 2007: Central Compilation and Translation Press, Beijing. Transl. Hong Sun
  • "Konsensus und Anarchie Die Funktion der Rhetoric für die Amerikanische Identität," in Amerikanische Mythen: Zur inneren Verfassung der Vereinigten Staaten, ed. Frank Unger, 1988: Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 16-43.
  • "A retórica como autoridade: puritanismo, a Bíblia e o mito da América," in Brasil & EUA: Religião e Identidade Nacional, ed. Viola Sachs, 1988: Edições Graal, Rio de Janeiro, pp. 14-158.
  • "Tipologia a Puritán Oj Angliában," in A Tipólogiai Szimbolizmus, ed. Tibor Fabiny, 1988: Szonyi Etelka, Szeged, pp. 379-412.

Selected articles

  • "Dramatic Irony in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground," Slavic and East European Journal, vol.8 (1964), pp. 284-291.
  • "Thomas Mann's 'Heavenly Alchemy': The Politics of The Holy Sinner," Symposium, vol. 20 (1966), pp. 29- 305.
  • "Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams Cotton Controversy Reassessed," American Quarterly, vol.19 (1967), pp. 166-191.
  • "Empedocles in the English Renaissance," Studies in Philology, vol. 65 (1968), pp. 67-80.
  • "Literature and the Repetition Compulsion," College English, vol.29 (1968), pp. 60-615.
  • "The Historiography of Johnson's Wonder Working Providence," Essex Institute Historical Collections, vol.104 (1968), pp. 138-161; reprinted in Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society, and Culture, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and F. J. Bremer, 1977: St. Martin's Press, New York, pp. 268-286.
  • "Puritan New England Rhetoric and the Jewish Problem," Early American Literature, vol.5 (1970), pp. 6- 71.
  • "How the Puritans Won the American Revolution," Massachusetts Review, vol. 17 (1976), pp. 597-630.
  • "The Typology of America's Mission," American Quarterly, vol.30 (1978), pp. 135-155.
  • "How The Puritans Discovered America," Revista di Studi Anglo Americani, vol 2 (1983), pp. 7-21.
  • "America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus," American Literature, vol. 58 (1986), pp. 99-107.
  • "Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent," South Atlantic Quarterly. vol. 89 (1989), pp. 624-662; reprinted in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence Buell, 1992: Prentice-Hall, NJ, pp. 101-129.
  • "How to Teach Melville's Pierre," in Amerikastudien, vol. 31 (1986), pp. 31-49; reprinted in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Myra Jehlen, 1994: Prentice Hall, NJ, pp. 116-126.
  • "The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History," Critical Inquiry, vol.12 (1986), pp. 631-653.
  • “Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise,” Representations, v ol.24 (1988), pp. 1-27; reprinted in The New American Studies, ed. Philip Fisher, 1991: University of California Press, pp. 43-69; and in American Literature, American Culture, ed. Gordon Hutner, 1999: Oxford University Press, pp. 516-537
  • "Investigations of an Americanist," Journal of American History, vol. 88 (1991), pp. 972-987.
  • "The Question of Literary History," Common Knowledge, vol. 4 (1995), pp. 1-8.
  • “Deadpan Huck; or, What’s Funny About Interpretation,” Kenyon Review, vol 24 (2002), pp. 90-134; reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan, 2004: St. Martin's Press, pp. 332-356; and in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain, ed Harold Bloom, 2006: Chelsea House
  • “The Myth of America,” Litteraria Pragensia (Prague), vol. 25 (2003), pp. 1-20

Translations from Yiddish

  • Itzik Manger, "The Golden Peacock" (with commentary), Hadassah Magazine, vol. 58 1966), pp. 6-7, 15.
  • Yaacov Zipper, "The True Image," Prism International, XII (1973), pp. 88 96; reprinted in Yiddish, I (1975), pp. 65-74; in Canadian Yiddish Writings, ed. Abraham Boyarsky and Lazar Sarna, 1976: Harvest House, Montreal, pp. 11-20, and in The Far Side of the River, ed. Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle, 1985: Mosaic Press, New York, 1985, pp. 15-24.
  • Itzik Manger, "Seven Ballads" (with commentary), Versus, No. 4 (1978), pp. 18-26.
  • Itzik Manger, "Eight Ballads" (with commentary), Moment, vol. 3 (1978), pp. 44 52; reprinted in Russian, in Jewish Survey, I (1979), pp. 14-16.
  • Sholom Aleichem, "The Pot" and "The Krushniker Delegation," in Stories of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse, 1979: New Republic Books, Washington, DC, pp. 71-81, 232-244.
  • Itzik Manger, "Five Ballads," Prism International, vol. 18 (1980), pp. 26-28.
  • Bryna Bercovitch, “Memories of a Russian Girlhood,” PacknTreger, no. 47 (2005), pp. 29-33 (with Sylvia Ary); introduction, p. 28
  • Bryna Bercovitch, “Becoming Revolutionary,” Arguing with the Storm: Canadian Women Writers, ed. Rhea Tregebov (Sumach Press: Toronto, 2007), pp. 59-78 (with Sylvia Ary)

Further reading

  • Alan Trachtenberg, “The Writer as America,” Partisan Review, vol. 46 (1977)
  • Edmund Morgan, "The Chosen People," New York Review of Books, vol. 26 (1979)
  • James W. Tuttleton, “Rewriting the History of American Literature,” The New Criterion (1986)
  • Russell J.Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Culture, New York: Methuen, 1986
  • Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “A New Context for a New American Studies?” American Quarterly, vol. 24 (1989)
  • Donald E. Pease, "The New Americanists," boundary 2, No. 77 (1990)
  • Michael Schuldiner, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and the American Puritan Imagination, Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992
  • Emily Budick, “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction, Pubilcations of the Modern Languages Association, vol. 107 (1992)
  • Sam B. Girgus, “’The New Covenant’ and the Dilemma of Dissensus: Bercovitch, Roth, and Doctorow,” in Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretative Theory, ed. Ellen Spolsky, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993
  • Gura, Philip, "What Hathe Bercovitch Wrought?," Reviews in American History, vol. 21 (1993)
  • Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, eds.. Cohesion and Dissent in America, Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994
  • Giuseppe Nori,“Sacvan Bercovitch: storia letteraria e molteplicità,” Ácoma, vol. 1 (1994)
  • Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995
  • Arnold Delfs, "Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch," New England Quarterly, vol. 70 (1997)
  • Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1998, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1998
  • Jean Pichette, "La politique dans le mirroir du puritanisme." Relations, no. 664 (2000)
  • Arthur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literaure, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Randall Fuller, Emerson's Ghosts: Literature. Politics, and the Making of Americanists, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007

MLA may refer to: Organizations Modern Language Association, United States of America MLA Style Manual, their widely-accepted works cited page guidelines. ... Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. ... Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is a writer who has written several critically aclaimed novels that blend history and social criticism. ...

Footnotes

  1. ^ Bercovitch, "The Ritual of American Consensus," Canadian review of American Studies, vol. 10 (1979), p. 271
  2. ^ Bercovitch, quoted in Giuseppe Nori, “Institutions, the Literary Canon, and a 'Chronic Outsider',” in Ripensare il canone. La letteratura inglese e angloamericana, ed. Gianfranca Balestra and Giovanna Mochi, Rome, Italy, Artemide, 2007, p. 71
  3. ^ Jonathan Arac, quoted in Paul Bove, In the Wake of Theory, Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992, p. 52
  4. ^ Bercovitch,
    • "Pierre, or the Ambiguities of American Literary History," in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 246-307
    • "Deadpan Huck, or What's Funny about Interpretation," Kenyon Review, Summer/Fall 2002, Vol. 24 Issue 3/4, pp. 90-145
  5. ^ Bercovitch, "The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History," Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer, 1986), pp. 631-653; p. 646
  6. ^ Gray, Richard. "Writing American Literary History," Journal of American Studies, vol. 40, no. 2 (2006), pp. 399-411; p. 411
  7. ^ Harlan, David. "'A People Blinded from Birth': American History According to Sacvan Bercovitch," Journal of American History, vol. 78, No. 3 (Dec., 1991), pp. 949-971; p. 970
  8. ^ New, Elisa. The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 7
  9. ^ Crews, Frederick. "Whose American Renaissance?," The New York Review of Books, vol. 35 no.16 (1988). pp. 68-81
  10. ^ Paul A. Bove, "Notes Towrds a Politics of 'American Literature," Critical Conditions: Regarding the Historical Moment, ed. Michael Hays, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992, p. 5
  11. ^ Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, p. xv
  12. ^ Bercovitch, American Puritanism: The Seventeenth Century, New York, AMS Press, 1983, 27 volumes; and The Millennium in America, from the Puritan Migration to the Civil War, New York: AMS Press. 1983, 43 volumes
  13. ^ For example, in Bercovitch's: "Games of Chess: A Model of Literary and Cultural Studies," Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means, ed. Robert Newman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 15-58 ; "'America' as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus," American Literature, Vol. 58, Issue 1 (1986), pp. 99-107; "The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies," "Culture" and the Problem of the Disciplines, ed. John Carlos Rowe, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 69-87
  14. ^ Bercovitch,The Office of "The Scarlet Letter," 1991: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 113-154; "Investigations oif an Americanist," "The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Dec., 1991), pp. 972-987
  15. ^ Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, Routledge: New York, 1993, pp. 307-352
  16. ^ Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, Verso: London, 2004), p.183
  17. ^ Bercovitch, Rites of Assent:, pp.1-28
  18. ^ Rites of Assent, pp. 353-376</> In other words, what remains distinctively American is the extraordinary capacity, on the part of those who control the venues of this extraordinarily heterogenous culture: (1) to promote the concept of America as the epitome of human progress; (2) to adjust that belief (linguistically, conceptually, ritually) to changing times, and thus (3) to persuade (as distiinct from coerce) a majority of Americans -- as individuals and as groups (economic, ethnic, religious, immigrant and native-born) -- to invest their hopes in this exceptionalist dream. <ref> Bercovitch, ''Rites of Assent,'' pp. 29-67</li> <li id="_note-18">'''[[#_ref-18|^]]''' Randall Fuller,''Emerson's Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists,'' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 123-125 </li> <li id="_note-19">'''[[#_ref-19|^]]''' Looby, Christopher. "Scholar and Exegete," ''Early American Literature,'' Vol. 39, No.1 (2004), p. 2 </li> <li id="_note-20">'''[[#_ref-20|^]]''' "Hubbell Award - 2004 [written by Richard Millington], "http://als-mla.org/HMBercovitch.htm</li> <li id="_note-21">'''[[#_ref-21|^]]''' Looby, "Scholar and Exegete," ''Early American Literaure'', Vol. 39, No. 1 (2004), pp. 5-6 </li></ol></ref>

 
 

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