Sacvan Bercovitch
Encyclopedia
Sacvan Bercovitch is a Canadian
Americanist
, literary and cultural critic and academic.
of his generation. Born in Montreal
, Quebec, 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
, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton
, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia
; from 1984 until he retired in 2001 he taught at Harvard
, 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. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1986. Bercovitch has also been a visiting faculty member at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth
, 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. 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).
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 cultural-historical context; (4) the centrality of the text in the process of communal self-definition, from colony to province to nationhood, from the Puritan use of scripture through the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, as well as through a national literary tradition; and, from all these four perspectives, (5) an understanding of the origins in New England Puritanism of a distinctive mode of expression and belief that eventuated in the "American" identity. Bercovitch has been charged with overlooking the spiritual and moral value of the Puritans. This points to the central aspect of his approach: the Puritan legacy as a rhetorical model of cultural continuity. He saw the Puritan "errand" as a proto-capitalist venture that offered a singularly compelling rationale for a modern community expanding into a major modern nation. What made it compelling from the start was not just its religious emphasis; it was the rhetoric through which that persistent (because remarkably adaptable, flexible)religious influence shaped Puritans' secular concept of their New World 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 that they read into their "New World": "America" as the new promised land—which is to say, the promised land of the new modern world. Over the next two centuries their vision opened into a sacred-secular symbology, one that (in changing forms, to accommodate changing times) nourished the rhetoric of a new identity, the United States as "America."
" and The Rites of Assent (as well as his edited collections on Reconstructing American Literary History and Ideology and Classic American Literature), which in effect "complete the writing of the history of American liberal 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, Bercovitch has argued that the strategy of American pluralism is precisely to elicit dissent—political, intellectual, aesthetic, and academic, both utopian (progressivist) and dystopian (catastrophic) -- in order to redirect it into an affirmation of American ideals. The argument has provoked polemics from both the right and the left. From the right, he was decried as the central figure of an upstart generation of New Americanists: from the left, he was labeled as a consensus historian who endorsed the idea of American exceptionalism. Partly in response to his critics, Bercovitch has qualified analysis in a series of essays (1) acknowledging the modes of basic resistance to ideology within democratic liberalism; (2) detailing the enormous energizing force of American ideals, economically and aesthetically; even while (3) insisting on the continuing power of the rhetoric of America to enlist utopia itself as a mainstay of the culture. 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."
, 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 a distinguished lecturer and keynote speaker at countless universities, colleges, and conferences throughout 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."
to UCLA, and from Beijing
to Oxford
, Tel Aviv
, and Rome
. One former student, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania
, has written of his "enormous talents as a teacher" that Bercovitch conveyed the ways in which "the same resources of language that transmit ideology also carry the capacity to 'break free' from preexisting ideas and to open new thresholds of aesthetic experience and understanding" In a more general tribute, another former student, now professor at UCLA, stated:
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
Americanist
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also includes fields as diverse as law, art, the media, film, religious studies, urban...
, literary and cultural critic and academic.
Education and academic career
Bercovitch is perhaps the most influential and controversial AmericanistAmerican studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also includes fields as diverse as law, art, the media, film, religious studies, urban...
of his generation. Born in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Quebec, He received his B.A. at Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University
Concordia University
Concordia University is a comprehensive Canadian public university located in Montreal, Quebec, one of the two universities in the city where English is the primary language of instruction...
(1958) and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University
Claremont Graduate University
Claremont Graduate University is a private, all-graduate research university located in Claremont, California, a city east of downtown Los Angeles...
(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
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
; from 1984 until he retired in 2001 he taught at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he held the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature (the Chair formerly held by Perry Miller
Perry Miller
Perry G. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history"...
); he is now the Powell M. Cabot Research Professor at Harvard. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1986. Bercovitch has also been a visiting faculty member at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
, the Bread Loaf School of English, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Rome
University of Rome La Sapienza
The Sapienza University of Rome, officially Sapienza – Università di Roma, formerly known as Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a coeducational, autonomous state university in Rome, Italy...
, 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. 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).
Early work
Bercovitch's early books, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad (along with his edited collections on typologyTypology (theology)
Typology in Christian theology and Biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the relationship between the Old and New Testaments...
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 cultural-historical context; (4) the centrality of the text in the process of communal self-definition, from colony to province to nationhood, from the Puritan use of scripture through the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, as well as through a national literary tradition; and, from all these four perspectives, (5) an understanding of the origins in New England Puritanism of a distinctive mode of expression and belief that eventuated in the "American" identity. Bercovitch has been charged with overlooking the spiritual and moral value of the Puritans. This points to the central aspect of his approach: the Puritan legacy as a rhetorical model of cultural continuity. He saw the Puritan "errand" as a proto-capitalist venture that offered a singularly compelling rationale for a modern community expanding into a major modern nation. What made it compelling from the start was not just its religious emphasis; it was the rhetoric through which that persistent (because remarkably adaptable, flexible)religious influence shaped Puritans' secular concept of their New World 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 that they read into their "New World": "America" as the new promised land—which is to say, the promised land of the new modern world. Over the next two centuries their vision opened into a sacred-secular symbology, one that (in changing forms, to accommodate changing times) nourished the rhetoric of a new identity, the United States as "America."
Later work
Through his exploration of the expressive culture of Puritan New England, Bercovitch moved forward, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toward a description of a distinctive nationalist ideology, involving the distinctive strategies of liberal culture. That ambition yielded his major books of the nineties, The Office of "The Scarlet LetterThe Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an...
" and The Rites of Assent (as well as his edited collections on Reconstructing American Literary History and Ideology and Classic American Literature), which in effect "complete the writing of the history of American liberal 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, Bercovitch has argued that the strategy of American pluralism is precisely to elicit dissent—political, intellectual, aesthetic, and academic, both utopian (progressivist) and dystopian (catastrophic) -- in order to redirect it into an affirmation of American ideals. The argument has provoked polemics from both the right and the left. From the right, he was decried as the central figure of an upstart generation of New Americanists: from the left, he was labeled as a consensus historian who endorsed the idea of American exceptionalism. Partly in response to his critics, Bercovitch has qualified analysis in a series of essays (1) acknowledging the modes of basic resistance to ideology within democratic liberalism; (2) detailing the enormous energizing force of American ideals, economically and aesthetically; even while (3) insisting on the continuing power of the rhetoric of America to enlist utopia itself as a mainstay of the culture. 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."
Contribution
Bercovitch's work, which has been translated into many languages, helped to redirect the study of Early American Literature and contributed to a new, historicist turn in American literary and cultural criticism. It is characterized by large historical claims; it is focused on close textual reading, understood in the broad sense of cultural textulity; and in this sense it bears theoretically on questions related to interdisciplinarity. His contribution may be summarized as follows: (1) he has helped restructure American literary history by his emphasis on cultural close reading; (2) he has called attention to the crucial religious dimensions of the American Way; (3) he has helped shape the inquiry into the rhetorical and social constructedness of the American identity, including the concepts of consensus history and American exceptionalism; (4) he has formulated connections between ideology (in its anthropological sense) and imaginative expression, emphasizing not only the cultural pressures on aesthetic expression but the explosive aesthetic force of literary texts; and (5) he has been influential in exploring the strategies of liberal dissent In the assessment of a recent literary historian, Bercovitch's "audacious writings signaled an important shift in the understanding of culture.... compelling revisions of [traditional] categories and assumptions." 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." The Hubbell Prize Committee commended Bercovitch for his "transformative effect on the practice of American literary scholarship." The citation for the Bode-Pearson Prize of the American Studies Association commended Bercovitch as "the key figure in the ideological turn of American literary study and the galvanizing source of its interdiscilpinary practice."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 SocietyAmerican Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society , located in Worcester, Massachusetts, is both a learned society and national research library of pre-twentieth century American History and culture. Its main building, known also as Antiquarian Hall, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark...
, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , located in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968...
, and the Huntington Library; he has won fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....
, the John Carter Brown Library, the Guggenheim Foundation
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation was established by Harry Guggenheim to support research on violence, aggression, and dominance.The foundation writes: "He was convinced that solid, thoughtful, scholarly and scientific research, experimentation, and analysis would in the end accomplish more...
, the American Council of Learned Societies
American Council of Learned Societies
The American Council of Learned Societies , founded in 1919, is a private nonprofit federation of seventy scholarly organizations.ACLS is best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awards. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D...
, and the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
; he has represented the Fulbright Scholar Program in Europe (Prague, Moscow, Warsaw, Coimbra. Portugal, and elsewhere) and has been a distinguished lecturer and keynote speaker at countless universities, colleges, and conferences throughout 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
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. 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
Sholom Aleichem
Sholem Aleichem was the pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a leading Yiddish author and playwright...
and other Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
writers) and received an Emeritus Professor Grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project on “The Ashkenazi Renaissance, 1880-1940."
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 YaleYALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
to UCLA, and from Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
to Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
, and Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. One former student, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, has written of his "enormous talents as a teacher" that Bercovitch conveyed the ways in which "the same resources of language that transmit ideology also carry the capacity to 'break free' from preexisting ideas and to open new thresholds of aesthetic experience and understanding" In a more general tribute, another former student, now professor at UCLA, stated:
"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."
Writer
- The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 1975: Yale University Press, New Haven and London; Second Printing, 1976; Paperback edition, 1977. ISBN 0300021178
- 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
- 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 WestNathanael WestNathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...
: Novels and Other Writings, 1997: Library of AmericaLibrary of AmericaThe Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
, New York. Selection and Chronology, pp. 807–812. ISBN 1883011280
Selected 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.
- "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
- "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
Selected articles
- "America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus," American Literature, vol. 58 (1986), pp. 99–107.
- "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.
- “The Myth of America,” Litteraria Pragensia (Prague), vol. 25 (2003), pp. 1–20; reprinted in After History, ed. Martin Prochazka, 2006, Litteraria Pragensia, pp,345-370
Selected Translations from Yiddish
- 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, "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.
- Bryna Bercovitch, “Becoming Revolutionary,” Arguing with the Storm: Canadian Women Writers, ed. Rhea Tregebov (Sumach Press: Toronto, 2007), pp. 59–78 (with Sylvia Ary); second edition, Feminist Press, 2008, pp. 33–49
Books
- Michael Schuldiner, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and the American Puritan Imagination, Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992
- Russell J.Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Culture, New York: Methuen, 1986
- Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, eds.. Cohesion and Dissent in America, Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994
- Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995
- Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1998, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1998
- Michael Kramer and Nan Goodman, eds. The Turn Around American Religion in America: Literature Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch, New York: Palgrave Press, 2011
Articles
- 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)
- 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)
- Emily Budick, “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction, 'Publications of the Modern Language AssociationModern Language AssociationThe Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
, vol. 107 (1992) - Sam B. Girgus, “’The New Covenant’ and the Dilemma of Dissensus: Bercovitch, RothPhilip RothPhilip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
, 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 Hath Bercovitch Wrought?," Reviews in American History, vol. 21 (1993)
- Arnold Delfs, "Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch," New England Quarterly, vol. 70 (1997)