Sacvan Bercovitch

Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, 1933 – December 8, 2014) was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States.

During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies.

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 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.

After his official retirement from an academic career, Bercovitch 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."

Bercovitch was a popular teacher on both the undergraduate and the graduate levels; many of his students now occupy prominent positions at universities and colleges from Yale to UCLA, and from Beijing to Oxford, Tel Aviv, and Rome.

[citation needed] One former student, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written of his "enormous talents as a teacher" and 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" [12] 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.

"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.