Madam Speaker, I am most pleased to recognize the outstanding contributions of Dr. Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus of Harvard University, who has been awarded the Bode-Pearson Prize for his…
Madam Speaker, I am most pleased to recognize the outstanding contributions of Dr. Sacvan Bercovitch, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus of Harvard University, who has been awarded the Bode-Pearson Prize for his outstanding contributions to American studies.
Professor Bercovitch is the brother of a beloved constituent, Ninel Segal. He has been called ``one of the great literary historians of the 20th century'' and ``one of the first American scholars to analyze the ideological and rhetorical functions of literature and to link art to political and cultural themes.'' Many of his works have been translated in French, German, Chinese, Italian, and others. I am pleased to insert into the Record the citation presented to Professor Bercovitch by the American Studies Association:
``Rare, extravagant spirits,'' says Emerson in his essay on
History, ``come to us at intervals, who disclose to us new
facts in nature.'' Tonight it gives me great pleasure, on
behalf of my fellow committee members, Elaine May and James
Miller, to award the Bode-Pearson prize to one such spirit,
indeed, the presiding spirit of American Studies, Sacvan
Bercovitch. Through his writings, intellectual projects, and
service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an
unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the last
30 years. Perhaps no single literary historian has exerted
the profound influence over his field that Bercovitch has,
for he has been the key figure in the ideological turn of
American literary study and the galvanizing source of its
interdisciplinary practice. If the American Studies community
is infinitely more robust than it was the last time the
Association met in Philadelphia in 1983 when tonight's
honoree was its president, it may well be the fruit of Sacvan
Bercovitch's labors. If this sounds extravagant, know that it
merely does justice to the extravagant bounty of his
learning, the extravagant scope of his inquiry, the
extravagantly searching range of his intellect, the
extravagant intensity of his example for three generations of
students, and the extravagant vitality of his commitment.
Bercovitch began his career as an Americanist with his publication, in 1966, of an essay on Cotton Mather, but he had begun his informal study of America some years before. As a Canadian from Montreal's rough-and-tumble Yiddish-speaking quarter, his fascination with U.S. culture preceded his engagement with its literary traditions. While Bercovitch never lost that connection to his past, and indeed, translated several of the great Yiddish writers of the 20th century, his own American studies took him to the New School of Social Research, Reed College, Hightstown, New Jersey, where he trained to join a kibbutz in Israel, then on to Claremont college, where he took his graduate degrees, then to Brandeis, and UC-San Diego until he arrived at Columbia, where he was to stay for 13 years before taking his last academic post, at Harvard. Like Hawthorne's Holgrave, he worked at various trades, scholarly and otherwise, all of which contributed to the swell of consciousness that resulted in two paradigm-changing scholarly works of his early career: The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1979).
In the early 1980s, Bercovitch developed the intellectual underpinnings of the next great phase of his career, when he edited and co edited two seminal books of the era, Reconstructing American Literary History and Ideology and Classic American Literature. Let me remind you how influential those collections were when they appeared two decades ago. For the first, Bercovitch assembled an impressive line-up of scholars and literary historians whose work would resonate for years to come--like Sandra Gilbert, Walter Michaels, Werner Sollors, Wendy Steiner, Robert Stepto, and Eric Sundquist, scholars who made the case for profession only slowly--all too slowly--awakening to the realization that the literary history of the U.S. needed to be reconstructed; with Myra Jehlen, he showed that the urgency of that reconstruction was ideological and that classic American literature, the redoubt of liberal humanism, was nothing if not political, in a series of essays by Jonathan Arac, Houston Baker, Gerald Graff, Don Pease, Carolyn Porter, Jane Tompkins, and Alan Trachtenberg, among other distinguished contributors. These collections, in no small part, helped to reinvent the study of American literature and, in so doing, changed the future of this Association.
Some of you will remember vividly what the Association's meetings were like as a direct consequence of Bercovitch's term, in San Diego, New York, and Miami, and can assure people who have only recently found a home here that the intellectual ferment of these years was dizzying, especially to the extent that it matched Sacvan Bercovitch's critical example: the cultural study of literature and literary study of culture broke wide open the intellectual boundaries of the Americanists' sense of the object of scholarly inquiry. That generation of scholars who changed the way we do business, if only because they followed the ways his work so vigorously aroused the possibilities of interdisciplinary study, through what Bercovitch called the ``reciprocities between symbolic and social systems.'' Moreover his leadership also gave the Association a new critical urgency, by moving it away from the hidebound, dry academicism that had dominated it for the previous two decades and toward public engagement. At the time there were many who resisted and not a few who resented this new direction, yet the growth of the Association might suggest just how sorely needed and how keenly received was the charge that Sacvan Bercovitch had laid before us. The ASA's sense of itself has evolved in the last ten years, and perhaps the role of cultural study of literature and the literary study of culture is not as crucial as it once was, but these changes have only been possible because of the difference that Bercovitch--his colleagues, students, and followers--first wrought.
That charge was freshly shaped in his next great
contribution to American literary studies, his supervision of
the new Cambridge History of American Literature, brought to
completion only in the year before last. This project made
bold to rewrite, not as one book or two or even the four
volumes that its predecessor had essayed 70 years prior, but
as eight volumes written by some thirty scholars. The task
proved arduous, and perhaps its completion depended as much
upon the contributors' loyalty to Bercovitch as it did their
commitment to their assignment. The lesson rehearsed in page
after page of the History is ``dissensus,'' the vision of
literary history that rejects easy coherence and instead
accommodates the evidence of vivifying resistance out of
which a fuller, truer history may be understood--the turning
of the inside of literary texts out and the turning of
contexts in. Bercovitch's founding idea prompted a complex
way of imagining literary historiography, one that especially
enlivened the understanding of students and younger scholars,
so much so that the ``History'' that they created was largely
understood to be something of a generational enterprise.
Indeed, the influence of the Cambridge History can be
calculated in the way its separate parts have arrived with
all the authority of established wisdom; its arguments
crystallize the very terms of our practice over 20 years. In
this sense, its eight volumes are but the shell of a project
that will outlast us all.
Bercovitch's own reading and research led him to Hawthorne
and inevitably The Scarlet Letter, but I will pass over the
great achievements of his scholarship, just as I also pass
over the dutiful recitations of his many, many honors and
awards, the editorial and advisory boards and executive
committees on which he has served, the consultantships, the
positions of leadership he undertook in a surprising variety
of places all too numerous to mention, in order to take a
final few minutes to recall his presidency of this
association. In so many ways, the current ASA is a wonderful
prism of his multifaceted accomplishments. Members of longer
standing than I will testify that Bercovitch ``saved'' the
ASA, by which they mean that during his tenure he undertook a
major effort to resuscitate and transform the organization.
At the time, ASA was wholly dependent on the University of
Pennsylvania and in debt a considerable amount of money to
them. Penn even held the copyright to AQ. Bercovitch
mobilized a number of influential ASA members, including past
president Daniel Aaron and Leo Marx, to change the modus
operandi. He also realized that, most of all, the culture of
ASA had to change, and beginning with a panel of luminaries
devoted to the organization's future at Philadelphia in 1983,
he undertook to reshape it into the entity we know today. As
part of a major re-evaluation, the association took ownership
of its journal, established new publishing arrangements,
raised new funds, relocated to Washington, DC, shifted to
annual meetings (although the planning for this began with
Bercovitch, Michael Cowan eventually pushed it through).
Plus, the ASA under Bercovitch began to internationalize,
reinvigorating ties with the Canadian and European
associations, even as it moved forcefully to diversify,
naming Martha Banta as program chair of the San Diego
conference, which, in turn, featured the work of several
future presidents--Mary Helen Washington, Stephen Sumida,
Vicki Ruiz--all of whom became involved in the organization
for the first time.
In short, we might dedicate ourselves tonight to making ASA
worthy of this immeasurably rich legacy. So please join with
me and applaud, extravagantly, the career of
Saki Bercovitch.--Gordon Hutner, Professor of American
Literature, University of Illinois, Editor, American Literary
History.