... and material. His chosen five “all felt it was incumbent on their gen- eration to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution,” to just “provide” and “express” an American culture, a culture of America. As Sacvan Bercovitch summarizes it, American Renaissance offers a vision of “five...

... stands out for its continuing capacity to engage productively with arguments by his juniors, including some so eminent as Sacvan Bercovitch and Edward Said. This new book arises from Spanos’s recognition that he and Jonathan Arac understand differently the significance of “contrapuntal criticism...

... it into the American context, in which, according to Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad , the Puritan founders' figural reenactment of the Exodus story is, in fact, one of conquest and occupation rather than emancipation. Such a retrieval and reconstellation will show that Said's genealogy of the Zionist...

..., Arac refused to credit any difference in their rhetorical or political status. In The Office of the Scarlet Letter, Sacvan Bercovitch proposed that what Arac had described as Hawthorne’s politics were more accurately de- scribed as apolitics or postpolitics. According to Bercovitch...

..., of the “American Jeremiad,” analyzed by Sacvan Bercovitch. We must see it in the context of the origins of American exceptionalism in the Massachusetts Bay Puri- tans’ exodus from the Old World into the New, in the defining distinction they made between a civilized world that had become “old,” “decadent...

... which what Sacvan Bercovitch has called the “Emersonian legacy” has been regulatively inherited. Emerson encouraged contradictory readings of his work when he refused to consolidate the heterogeneous personifications of his project into a coherent identity. Rather than making them...

...—­a pattern he (following critics such as Sacvan Bercovitch)4 traces back to the Puritan “errand in the wilderness” and its brutal incarnations as manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. The points of this psychic mapping of the “below” gradu- ally trace a spectral neighborhood: a proximity...

... Medusan eye. And, despite his inter- ment, you will hear from him again In his magisterial reading of Pierre, Sacvan Bercovitch notes Mel- ville’s use of the metaphorics of shadowing to evoke the return of the oblit- erated violence of the American past to haunt the hegemonic American present...

... 1990): 11–12. 2. The virtual absence of reference to contemporary continental theory in the bibliog- raphies and indexes of the new Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. vols. 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1995), bears symptomatic witness...

... and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, 247 66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collini, Stefan. 2004. On Variousness. New Left Review 27 (May June): 65 97. Jameson, Fredric. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso. Mulhern, Francis. 2000. Culture/Metaculture...

... History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 3, Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–62, and esp. 55–57. 25. Everett Carter, introduction to W. D. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, Selected Edition of W. D. Howells (Bloomington: Indiana...

... up 13. The most challenging characterization of this mobility remains Donald E. Pease, “Mel- ville and Cultural Persuasion,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 413–15. Pease does...

....: Princeton University Press, 2003), xiii. 33. This exclusion was in vain. See, for example, Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jere- miad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 34. Cotton Mather, “Of Poetry, and Style,” in American Thought and Writing, vol. 1, The Colonial Period, ed. Russel...

... Heideggerian reading of Sacvan Bercovitch, the new post-­9/11 Puritans of the security society are in the process of staging “the anxiety-provoking­ awesomeness of the wilderness as a spec- tacular threat to the ‘security’ of the covenantal people,” re-­presenting the “‘mystery’ of the world’s...

... Puritanism, there is another master trope that Ellison adapts: that of the jeremiad. The Americanist Sacvan Bercovitch has shown in the American Jeremiad (1978) that this form, originally a sermon of social lament, has a more powerful ideological force: It asserts the glorious model of ‘‘America...

... by the consoli- dation of the political impasses that the Reagan presidency had rendered manifest—namely, by the construal of the sundry opposition to Reagan- ite cultural hegemony and cultural imperialism as what Sacvan Bercovitch called “American jeremiads.” Jeremiads converted attempts to oppose...

... in the exceptionalist terms of the founding American myth of the frontier: the providentially ordained ‘‘errand in the wilderness 7 Or, rather, 6. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978...

... University Press, 1991), 31. 13. See Jonathan Arac, “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” in Ideology in Classic Ameri- can Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 247–66, esp. 262; also see Arac, Critical Genealogies, 263–72. 34 boundary 2 / May...

... that I have not solved, but I’m genuinely interested in it. I would like to propose a way forward, beginning with Erich Auer- bach’s Mimesis, which fortunes are taken up, I believe, in Sacvan Berco- vitch’s Puritan Origins of the American Self. Published three decades ago, Bercovitch’s text...

... to be American hubris.75 After the Vietnam War, New Ameri- canists, such as Sacvan Bercovitch, linked American neo-­imperialism to the country’s Protestant eschatological idioms.76 One might question the motives behind certain of these critiques of messianism (as I have queried those of the Christian...