Sacvan bercovitch biography of mahatma

Education and academic career

Bercovitch was born in Montreal, Quebec, and his given name is a portmanteau of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Anarchists who had been executed six years earlier. (Since then he's received honorary degrees from both institutions: an LLD from Concordia in 1993 and an HLD from Claremont in 2005).

Bercovitch taught at Brandeis, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia.

He had an uncanny ability to be at once knowing and innocent, a sophisticated master of the textual archive and a wide-eyed stranger, like Kafka’s Karl Roßmann, amazed by what he was witnessing on the shores of the New World. Bercovitch, for instance, took delight that he was a kind of upstart who inherited Room 417 in Widener Library, the former office of patrician Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

“He stylized himself modestly as a Canadian outsider,” said Sollors, “a figure from a Kafka story, or a chess player who has to deal with constantly changing rules.”

Bercovitch was born in 1933 in a Jewish ghetto in Montreal.

During his career, he also lectured at Princeton and Stanford universities and at others around the world. “In this country,” he writes, “the unmediated relation between social structure and social ideal has made the very exposure of social flaws part of a ritual of socialization—a sort of liminal interior dialogue that in effect reinforces the mainstream culture.” The books The Office of the Scarlet Letter and Rites of Assent: Transformations in further expanded and deepened his approach.

Fruitfully, he would occasionally swerve off that path.

“Bercovitch is the opposite of a provincial Americanist,” wrote UCLA professor Christopher Looby in a 2002 tribute. It is characterized by large historical claims; it is focused on close textual reading, understood in the broad sense of cultural textuality; and in this sense it bears theoretically on questions related to interdisciplinarity.

in English at Claremont Graduate School in California. in 1965, with a dissertation on Cotton Mather. One critic wrote that “The Puritan Origins of the American Self,” the book that four decades ago put the young scholar on the literary map, “so suddenly inspired such intense admiration and controversy.”

Friends knew him to enjoy tweaking authority and to be skeptical of privilege and power, which may have been a legacy from his Marxist parents.

The store paid for his night school education at what was then Sir George Williams College.

His long and complex life and his own illnesses gave him patience and insight about how to deal with adversity. This points to the central aspect of his approach: the Puritan legacy as a rhetorical model of cultural continuity. He could quip skeptically: “The universities used to cater to the elite, now it’s democracy. Various teaching appointments followed at Brandeis University, the University of California at San Diego, and Princeton University.

(Including Columbia and Harvard, Bercovitch supervised more than 100 Ph.D. He met his second wife, Susan Mizruchi, a Professor of American literature at Boston University.

He became internationally known for learned and provocative work on the entire range of American literature. 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."

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.