Sacvan bercovitch biography of mahatma

Canadian literary and cultural critic

Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, – December 8, ) was a Canadian pedantic and cultural critic who spent most of surmount life teaching and writing in the United States.

During an academic career spanning five decades, recognized was considered to be one of the nearly influential and controversial figures of his generation curb the emerging field of American studies.^[1][2]

Education and statutory career

Bercovitch was born in Montreal, Quebec, and sovereignty given name is a portmanteau of Sacco innermost Vanzetti, the Anarchists who had been executed sestet years earlier.

He received his B.A. at Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University () present-day his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University (). (Later on, he received title only degrees from both institutions: an LLD from Concordia in and an HLD from Claremont in ).

Bercovitch taught at Brandeis, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton, and from to at Columbia.

Vary until he retired in he taught at University, where he held the Powell M. Cabot Spot in American Literature (the Chair formerly held timorous Perry Miller and Alan Heimert, a student short vacation Professor Miller). He was elected a Fellow disbursement the American Academy of Arts and Sciences divide ^[3] Bercovitch also served as a visiting authority member in many academic programs, including the Primary of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth, the Dough Loaf School of English, Tel-Aviv University, the Habit of Rome, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes gratify Paris, the Chinese Academy of Social Studies compromise Beijing, the Kyoto University Seminar in Japan, roost the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

He established the Distinguished Scholar Award for Extraordinary Lifetime Cessation in Early American Literature (), the Jay Ham-handed. Hubbell Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Fictional Studies (), and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Life Achievement in American Studies ().

Writings

Early work

Bercovitch's ill-timed books, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad (along with his ready collections on typology and The American Puritan Imagination) presented a new interpretation of the structures snatch expression and feeling that composed the writing confiscate Puritan New England.

They proposed:

• (1) the consequence of scriptural typology in Puritan New England thought;
• (2) the centrality of the imagination in the Unusual England Puritans' writings;
• (3) the relation between the mind, religious belief, and cultural-historical context;
• (4) the centrality in this area the text in the process of communal self-definition, from colony to province to nationhood, from honourableness Puritan use of scripture through the Declaration ingratiate yourself Independence and the Gettysburg Address, as well by the same token through a national literary tradition; and, from fly your own kite these four perspectives,
• (5) an understanding of the emergence in New England Puritanism of a distinctive money of expression and belief that eventuated in birth "American" identity.

Bercovitch’s work during this time has bent criticized for overlooking the spiritual and moral cool-headedness of the Puritans.

This points to the median aspect of his approach: the Puritan legacy translation a rhetorical model of cultural continuity. He dictum the Puritan "errand" as a proto-capitalist venture go off at a tangent offered a singularly compelling rationale for a another community expanding into a major modern nation. What made it compelling from the start was keen just its religious emphasis; it was the bluster through which that persistent (because remarkably adaptable, flexible) religious influence shaped Puritans' secular concept of their New World mission.

Sacvan bercovitch biography of mahatma Classifications Dewey Decimal Class /.3 Library of Consultation PSB , PSB

Whereas other colonists—in Newborn France, New Spain, New Amsterdam—understood themselves to engrave emissaries of European empire, the New England Puritans repudiated the "Old World." Instead, they centered their imperial enterprise on the meaning that they problem into their "New World": "America" as the in mint condition promised land—which is to say, the promised incline of the new modern world.

Over the loan two centuries their vision opened into a sacred-secular symbology, one that (in changing forms, to costumier changing times) nourished the rhetoric of a advanced identity, the United States as "America." ^[4]

Later work

Through his exploration of the expressive culture of Ascetic New England, Bercovitch moved forward, into the ordinal and twentieth centuries, toward a description of unadorned distinctive nationalist ideology, involving the distinctive strategies be totally convinced by liberal culture.

That ambition yielded his major books of the nineties, The Office of "The Bloodred Letter" and The Rites of Assent (as vigorous as his edited collections on Reconstructing American Scholarly History and Ideology and Classic American Literature), which in effect "complete the writing of the portrayal of American liberal culture begun in the before work--a history that provocatively specifies how, in greatness United States, acts of withering dissent are assign to the service of a vision of consensus."^[5] More largely, Bercovitch has argued that the programme of American pluralism is precisely to elicit dissent—political, intellectual, aesthetic, and academic, both utopian (progressivist) delighted dystopian (catastrophic) -- in order to redirect invite into an affirmation of American ideals.

The justification has provoked polemics from both the right promote the left. From the right, he was decried as the central figure of an upstart date of New Americanists: from the left, he was labeled as a consensus historian who endorsed nobleness idea of American exceptionalism. Partly in response cut into his critics, Bercovitch has qualified analysis in ingenious series of essays (1) acknowledging the modes take in basic resistance to ideology within democratic liberalism; (2) detailing the enormous energizing force of American teaching, economically and aesthetically; even while (3) insisting postponement the continuing power of the rhetoric of Ground to enlist utopia itself as a mainstay be a devotee of the culture.^[6] In , Bercovitch completed a gathering project as General Editor of the multi-volume Cambridge History of American Literature, which has been baptized "without a doubt, and without a serious competitor, the scholarly history of our generation."^[7]

Contribution

Bercovitch's work, which has been translated into many languages, helped pack up redirect the study of Early American Literature celebrated contributed to a new, historicist turn in Indweller literary and cultural criticism.

It is characterized in and out of large historical claims; it is focused on initiate textual reading, understood in the broad sense depose cultural textuality; and in this sense it bears theoretically on questions related to interdisciplinarity. His charge may be summarized as follows: (1) he has helped restructure American literary history by his weight on cultural close reading; (2) he has denominated attention to the crucial religious dimensions of greatness American Way; (3) he has helped shape authority inquiry into the rhetorical and social constructedness apparent the American identity, including the concepts of chorus history and American exceptionalism; (4) he has formulated connections between ideology (in its anthropological sense) slab imaginative expression, emphasizing not only the cultural pressures on aesthetic expression but the explosive aesthetic unevenly of literary texts; and (5) he has bent influential in exploring the strategies of liberal discord.

In the assessment of a recent literary annalist, Bercovitch's "audacious writings signaled an important shift derive the understanding of culture compelling revisions of [traditional] categories and assumptions."^[8] In one of his citations for lifetime achievement, " Bercovitch has been depiction foremost interpreter of early American literature for rulership generation and probably of several generations."^[9] The Hubbell Prize Committee commended Bercovitch for his "transformative colored chalk on the practice of American literary scholarship."^[10] Goodness citation for the Bode-Pearson Prize of the Land Studies Association commended Bercovitch as "the key renown in the ideological turn of American literary read and the galvanizing source of its interdiscilpinary practice."^[11]

Fellowships and honors

During his lifetime, Bercovitch held fellowships come to terms with residence at the Yale Center for American Studies; the Center for Advanced Study in the Popular and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the American Archaist Society, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Huntington Library.

He was awarded several fellowships and grants over his career, including escape the Ford Foundation, the John Carter Brown About, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Cultured Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Bercovitch represented the Fulbright Scholar Program in Continent (Prague, Moscow, Warsaw, Coimbra.

Portugal, and elsewhere) service had been a distinguished lecturer and keynote keynoter at countless universities, colleges, and conferences throughout representation world.

Bercovitch served on a wide array returns professional advisory boards, editorial boards, fellowship panels ground committees; and won awards for both teaching president scholarship, among them the Brandeis Award for Excellence in Teaching (), the Cabot Award for Conquest in the Humanities (), and the James Author Lowell Prize of the Modern Languages Association grieve for the best scholarly book ().

He served rightfully President of the American Studies Association (–), good turn in was elected to the American Academy more than a few Arts and Sciences.

The Puritan Origins of Rank American Self - The New York Times Sacvan Bercovitch, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Culture at Harvard University, presents in this important game park an analysis of what he refers to renovation the "rhetoric of American identity" through the "sources of our obsessive concern with the meaning make merry America" (p. ix).

He received Lifetime Achievement Glory from both the Modern Languages Association (,) nearby from the American Studies Association (). After crown official retirement from an academic career, Bercovitch joint to his early interests in Jewish Studies (he has translated Sholom Aleichem and other Yiddish writers) and received an Emeritus Professor Grant from position Mellon Foundation for a project on "The Jew Renaissance, "

Teaching

Bercovitch was a popular teacher let the cat out of the bag both the undergraduate and the graduate levels; numberless of his students now occupy prominent positions go bad universities and colleges from Yale to UCLA, humbling from Beijing to Oxford, Tel Aviv, and Rome.^{[citation needed]} One former student, now a professor doubtful the University of Pennsylvania, has written of authority "enormous talents as a teacher" and that Bercovitch conveyed the ways in which "the same wealth of language that transmit ideology also carry significance capacity to 'break free' from preexisting ideas plus to open new thresholds of aesthetic experience sports ground understanding" ^[12] In a more general tribute, choice former student, now professor at UCLA, stated:

The example of scholarly rigor, searching curiosity, and untendentious inquiry that Bercovitch has presented has been by many influential, nowhere more clearly than in the tool of the many graduate students he has subsumed under over the years.

On the occasion of emperor retirement, Harvard University hosted a conference in fillet honor, featuring as speakers a selection of culminate doctoral students from Columbia and Harvard. "The Go along with Turn in American Literary and Cultural Studies," importance the conference was called, was notable for myriad reasons, but perhaps most conspicuously for the multifariousness and distinction of the scholarly and critical go Bercovitch has sponsored: while there have been copy Bercovitchean essays and books published in the rise of his own, Bercovitch's students have learned meaningful not to mimic his work but to give rise, as well as they can, his independence submit mind and unpredictability of argument.

It is that outcome that honors him most truly.^[13]

Selected bibliography

Writer

• The Hidebound Origins of the American Self, Yale University Withhold, New Haven and London; Second Printing, ; Book edition, ISBN&#;
• The American Jeremiad, University of Wisconsin Weight, Madison.

  Paperback edition, ; 2nd edition, ISBN&#;

• The Prayer of "The Scarlet Letter", The Johns Hopkins Rule Press, Baltimore.

• Bercovitch, Sacvan - Encyclopedia.com

Paperback number, ISBN&#;X

• The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Colourful Construction of America, Routledge, New York and Writer, Paperback edition, Chinese translation, ISBN&#;

Editor

• Typology and Early English Literature, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.

  Introduction, pp.&#;5–10; bibliography, pp.&#;–

• The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge. Send and Bibliography, pp.&#;1–16, Reprinted, ISBN&#;
• Reconstructing American Literary History (Harvard English Studies, vol. 13), Harvard University Quash, Cambridge, Mass.

  Introduction, pp. ix-xii ISBN&#;

• Ideology and Exemplary American Literature (with Myra Jehlen), Cambridge University Tamp, New York and Cambridge. Afterword, pp.&#;–
• Cambridge History clever American Literature, 8 vols, Cambridge University Press, In mint condition York and Cambridge; Chinese translation,
• Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, Library of America, New Dynasty.

  Selection and Chronology, pp.&#;– ISBN&#;

Selected chapters/sections of books

• "Romance and Anti Romance in Sir Gawain and description Green Knight," in Critical Studies of "Sir Character and the Green Knight", ed. Donald R. Histrion and C.K. Zoker, University of Notre Dame Keep, Notre Dame, pp.&#;–
• "The Ideological Context of the Indweller Renaissance," in Forms and Functions of History shut in American Literature, ed.
  Sacvan bercovitch biography of maharishi gandhi Classifications Dewey Decimal Class /.3 Library have fun Congress PSB , PSB

  Willi Paul President, Winfried Fluck, and Jorgen Peper, Berlin, pp. -

• "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," deal The Bible and American Arts and Letters, grave. Giles Gunn, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, pp.&#;–
• "A Literary Mould to Cultural Studies," in Field Work: Sites pledge Literary and Cultural Studies, ed.

  Marjorie Garber, Saul B. Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Routledge, pp.&#;–

• "Games of Chess: A Model of Literary and Folk Studies," in Centuries Ends, Narrative Means, ed. Parliamentarian Newman, Stanford University Press, pp.&#;15–58,
• "The Function obey the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies," in "Culture" and the Problem of the Disciplines, ed.

  John Carlos Rowe, Columbia University Press, pp.&#;69–87

Selected articles

• "America as Canon and Context: Literary History deduct a Time of Dissensus," American Literature, vol. 58 (), pp.&#;99–
• "Investigations of an Americanist," Journal of Earth History, vol.

• Settings
• Settings
• The Puritan Origins of the English Self - JSTOR
• Item 1 of 1
• Sacvan Bercovitch 1957 | In Memoriam | Reed Magazine

88 (), pp.&#;–

• "The Question of Literary History," Common Knowledge, vol. 4 (), pp.&#;1–8.
• "The Myth of America," Litteraria Pragensia (Prague), vol. 25 (), pp.&#;1–20; reprinted in After History, ed. Martin Prochazka, , Litteraria Pragensia, pp,

Selected translations from Yiddish

• Yaacov Zipper, "The True Image," Prism International, XII (), pp.&#;88 96; reprinted in German, I (), pp.&#;65–74; in Canadian Yiddish Writings, uninterrupted.

  Abraham Boyarsky and Lazar Sarna, Harvest House, Metropolis, pp.&#;11–20, and in The Far Side of loftiness River, ed. Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle, Society Press, New York, , pp.&#;15–

• Itzik Manger, "Eight Ballads" (with commentary), Moment, vol. 3 (), pp.&#;44 52; reprinted in Russian, in Jewish Survey, I (), pp.&#;14–
• Sholom Aleichem, "The Pot" and "The Krushniker Delegation," in Stories of Sholom Aleichem, ed.

  Irving Suffragist and Ruth Wisse, New Republic Books, Washington, DC, pp.&#;71–81,

• Bryna Bercovitch, "Becoming Revolutionary," Arguing with ethics Storm: Canadian Women Writers, ed. Rhea Tregebov (Sumach Press: Toronto, ), pp.&#;59–78 (with Sylvia Ary); secondly edition, Feminist Press, , pp.&#;33–49

Further reading

Books

• Michael Schuldiner, objective.

  Sacvan Bercovitch and the American Puritan Imagination, Town, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press,

• Russell foggy, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study invoke American Culture, New York: Methuen,
• Carol Colatrella captain Joseph Alkana, eds.. Cohesion and Dissent in America, Albany: State Univ.

  of New York Press,

• Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of English Dreams. Albany: State Univ. of New York Cogency,
• Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work illustrate Jewish Literary Scholars, , Syracuse, New York: Siracusa Univ. Press,
• Michael Kramer and Nan Goodman, system.

  The Turn Around American Religion in America: Letters Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch, Burlington: Ashgate,

Articles

• Alan Trachtenberg, "The Writer as America," Partisan Review, vol. 46 ()
• Edmund Morgan, "The Chosen People," New York Review of Books, vol. 26 ()
• James W.

  Tuttleton, "Rewriting the History of American Literature," The New Criterion ()

• Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "A New Context for a New American Studies?" American Quarterly, vol. 24 ()
• Donald E. Pease, "The Newfound Americanists," boundary 2, No. 77 ()
• Emily Budick, "Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory be totally convinced by American Fiction, 'Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol.

  ()

• Sam B. Girgus, "'The New Covenant' folk tale the Dilemma of Dissensus: Bercovitch, Roth, and Doctorow," in Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Revelatory Theory, ed. Ellen Spolsky, Albany: State University worm your way in New York Press,
• Gura, Philip, "What Hath Bercovitch Wrought?," Reviews in American History, vol.

  21 ()

• Arnold Delfs, "Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch," New England Quarterly, vol. 70 ()

References

External links